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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



The 

Colonial Cavalier 



Or 



Southern Life Before the 
Revolution 



By 

Maud Wilder Goodwin 



Illustrated by 

Harry Edwards 




New York 

Lovell, Coryell & Company 

1894 






FHw 



Copyright, 1894, 

BY 

UNITED STATES BOOK COMPANY. 
All Rights Reserved. 



Contents 



Preface, . 


. 


• 7 


His Home, 


. 


• *3 


Sweethearts and Wives, . 


. 


43 


His Dress, 




73 


News, Trade and Travel, 


. 


97 


His Friends and Foes, 




125 


His Amusements, . 




141 


His Man-Servants and His 


Maid-Servants, 


165 


His Church, 




189 


His Education, 


. 


221 


Laws, Punishments and Politics, 


243 


Sickness and Death, 


. 


273 



The (Colonial Qavalier 



Preface 

TWO great forces have contributed to the mak- 
ing of the Anglo-American character. The 
types, broadly classed in England as Puritan and 
Cavalier, repeated themselves in the New World. 
On the bleak 'Massachusetts coast, the Puritan 
emigrants founded a race as rugged as their en- 
vironment. Driven by the force of compelling 
conscience from their homes, they came to the new- 
land, at once pilgrims and pioneers, to rear altars 
and found homes in the primeval forest. It was 
not freedom of worship alone they sought, but their 
own way. They found it and kept it. Such a 
race produced a strong and hardy type of man- 
hood, admirable if not always lovable. 

But there was another force at work, moulding 
the national character, a force as persistent, a type 
as intense as the Puritan's own, and its exact oppo- 
site. The men who settled the Southern Colonies, 
Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, were Cav- 
aliers; not necessarily in blood, or even in loyalty 
to the Stuart cause, but Cavalier in sympathies, in 
the general view of life, in virtues and vices. So 

7 



PkEFACE. 

far as the provinces could represent the mother 
country, Virginia and Maryland reflected the 
Cavaliers, as Massachusetts and Connecticut re- 
flected the Puritans. 

Their settlers came, impelled by no religious mo- 
tives, and driven by no persecution. They lacked, 
therefore, the bond of a common enthusiasm 
and the still stronger tie of a common antipathy. 
Above all, they lacked the town-meeting. Sepa- 
rated by the necessities of plantation life, they 
formed a series of tiny kingdoms rather than a 
democratic community. To the Puritan, the vil- 
lage life of Scrooby and its like was familiar and 
therefore dear; but to the Southern settlers, the 
ideal was the great estate of the English gentry 
whose descendants many of them were. 

The term, "Cavalier," came into vogue in the 
struggle between Charles the First and his Parlia- 
ment, but the type itself was already well-devel- 
oped in the reign of James, and under the fostering 
influence of Buckingham. A great deal of energy 
has been wasted in the discussion as to how much 
of this Cavalier blood was found among the early 
settlers. It is enough that we know that, between 
the coming of the first adventurers and the Res- 
toration, the number of " gentlemen" was sufficient 
to direct the policy of the State, and color the life 
of its society. 



PREFACE. 

When the earliest colonists left England, the 
Cavalier was at the height of his glory. Now he 
represents a lost cause, " and none so poor to do 
him reverence." The sceptre of royal authority 
is shattered; society has grown dull and decorous. 
Even in dress, the Puritan has prevailed. The peo- 
ple who speak of Cromwell's followers as " Round- 
heads" and " Cropped Ears," go closer cropped 
than they, and the costume of a gentleman of to- 
day is uglier and gloomier than any the Puritan 
ever dreamed of introducing. 

These concessions of the modern world make 
the Puritan a familiar figure, as he stands out in 
the page of Hawthorne, or on the canvas of Bough- 
ton. But the Cavalier fades into the dim and 
shadowy background of the past. We cannot af- 
ford to have him slip away from us so, if we wish 
really to understand the history of our country; 
we must know both sides of its development. 

Hitherto, the real comprehension of the Colonial 
Cavalier has been hindered by the florid enthu- 
siasm of the South, and the critical coldness of the 
North. His admirers have painted him as a 
theatrical personage, always powdered and be- 
rufHed, fighting duels as frequently as he changed 
his dress, living in lordly state in a baronial man- 
sion, or dancing in the brilliant halls of fashion in 
the season at the capital. All this is, of course, 

9 



PREFACE. 

seen to be absurd, as one comes to study the condi- 
tions under which he lived. We find the " capi- 
tal" a straggling village, the " estate" a half-culti- 
vated farm, and the " host of retainers" often but 
a mob of black slaves, clad in motley, or lying 
half-naked in the sun. Does it follow, then, that 
the lives of these men are not worth serious study? 
Surely not. It is in the very primitiveness of en- 
vironment that the chief interest of the study of 
that early life lies. Here were men who brought 
to the New World a keen appreciation of the luxu- 
ries and refined pleasures of life, who had not 
eschewed them for conscience's sake like the 
Puritan, yet who relinquished them all bravely 
and cheerfully, to face the hardships and dangers 
of a pioneer life; and when their descendants, 
growing rich with the increasing prosperity of the 
country, had once more surrounded themselves 
with beautiful homes and wide acres, they too 
stood ready to sacrifice them all at the call of Lib- 
erty. If we would understand Washington, and 
Jefferson, and the Lees, George Mason, and John 
Randolph, we must study them as the "Autocrat" 
tells us we should all be studied, for at least a 
century before birth. 

The Colonial Cavalier must be painted, like a 
Rembrandt, with high lights and deep shadows. 
It is idle to ignore his weaknesses or his vices. 



PREFACE. 

They are of the kind that insist on notice. Yet, 
with all his faults, he will surely prove well 
worth our serious consideration, and however 
wide we open our eyes to his defects, however 
we seek to brush away the illusions with which 
tinsel hero-worship has surrounded him, we shall 
still find him, judged as he has a right to be, at 
his best, closely approaching Lowell's definition 
of a gentleman: " A man of culture, a man of in- 
tellectual resources, a man of public spirit, a man 
of refinement, with that good taste which is the 
conscience of the mind, and that conscience which 
is the good taste of the soul." 

This little volume makes no pretensions to the 
dignity of a history. It aims only, through local 
gossip and homely details of life and customs, to 
open a side-door, through which we may, per- 
chance, gain a sense of fireside intimacy with 
The Colonial Cavalier. 

ii 



His Home 




The r* 1 -1 
i Uolonial *** 

Cavalier^ 

His Home 

1 STOOD in the wide 
hall of the old brick 
mansion built, a century 
and a half ago, by " King- 
Carter," on the shore of the James River. 

It was Autumn. The doors at either end of the 
saloon were open, and their casements framed the 
landscape like a picture. From the foot of the 
moss-grown steps at the rear, the drive stretched 
its length, under several closed gates, for half a 
mile, till it joined the little travelled high-road. 
From the porch in front, the ground fell away, in 
what had once been a series of terraces, to the 
brink of the river, across whose western hills the 
November sun was setting red. Not a ripple 
stirred the surface of the water — the dead leaves on 
the ground never rustled. All was still ; solitary, 
yet not melancholy. The place seemed apart from 
the present — a part of the past. 

Within doors, everything was mellowed by the 
i5 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

softening- touch of twilight and age. The hospita- 
ble fire which blazed in the great throat of the li- 
brary chimney, cast odd shadows on the high wain- 
scot, and the delicately wrought mouldings over 
the chimney-breast, and its reflections danced in 
the small panes of the heavily framed windows as 
though the witches were making tea outside. 

The dark staircase wound upward in the centre 
of the hallway, its handrail hacked by the swords of 
soldiers in the Revolution. As I glanced at it, and 
then out along the long avenue, I seemed to see 
Tarleton's scarlet-clad dragoons dashing up to 
surround the house. Then, as I turned westward, 
imagination travelled still further into the past, 
and pictured the slow approach of a British 
packet, gliding peacefully up to the little wharf 
down yonder, to discharge its household freight 
of tea and spices, of India muslins and " callaman- 
,coes" before it proceeded on its way to the town 
of Williamsburg, a few miles farther up the river. 

At the period of which I was dreaming, Wil- 
liamsburg was the capital of the province, with a 
wide street named in honor of the Duke of 
Gloucester, and a college named after their late 
majesties, William and Mary, with a jolly Raleigh 
tavern and a stately Governor's Palace; but all 
this had come about some fifty years before the 
building of Carter 's Grove. 

16 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

In the middle of the seventeenth century it 
was far more primitive, — indeed, it was not Wil- 
liamsburg at all, but only "The Middle Planta- 
tion," with a few pioneer houses surrounded by 
primeval forests, from which savage red faces now 
and then peered out, to the terror of the settlers ; 
while at nightfall the heavy wooden shutters had 
been closed, lest the firelight should prove a shin- 
ing mark for the Indian's arrow. If the traveller 
found Williamsburg in the eighteenth century " a 
straggling village," and its mansions "houses of 
very moderate pretensions," what would he have 
thought of those first modest homes, where the 
horse-trough was the family wash-basin; where 
stools and benches, hung against the wall, consti- 
tuted the furniture ; where the kitchen-table served 
for dining-table as well, and was handsomely set 
out with bowls, trenchers, and noggins of wood, 
with gourds and squashes daintily cut, to add color 
to the meal ; while the family was counted well off 
that could muster a few spoons, and a plate or two 
of shining pewter! But those pioneers and their 
wives felt pride in their little homes, for they real- 
ized how favorably they contrasted with the cabins 
built at "James Cittie" by Wingfield and Smith 
and their fellow-adventurers. They had indeed 
more cause for honest pride than the stay-at-homes 
in England could ever realize, for such knew 

19 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

nothing of the infinite toil and the difficulty of 
founding a settlement in a new country, thousands 
of miles from civilization, with forests to be cleared 
and savages to he fought, turbulent followers to 
be ruled, and food, shelter, and clothing to be 
provided. 

No sooner were the "Ancient Planters," as the 
chronicles call the first settlers, fairly ashore on 
their island, than the Company at home opened 
its battery of advice upon them : " Seeing order 
is at the same price with confusion," the secretary 
wrote, setting down a very dubious proposition as 
an aphorism, " it shall be advisably done to set 
your houses even and by a line, that your streets 
may have a good breadth, and be carried square 
about your market-place, and every street's end 
opening into it, that from thence, with a few field- 
pieces, you may command every street through- 
out; which market-place you may also fortify, if 
you think it needful." It must have seemed grimly 
humorous to those pioneers, huddling their cabins 
together within the shelter of the wooden fence, 
dignified by the name of a palisade, and mounted 
with all the guns they could muster, to be thus 
advised from a distance of three thousand miles 
to construct at once a model English village, and 
fortify the market-place, if they thought best. An 
Italian proverb Jias it that " it is easy to threaten 
.20 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

a bull from a window," and so the Virginia Com- 
pany found no difficulty in regulating the affairs 
of the colonists and the Indians, from their window 
in London. The settlers paid as little heed as 
possible to their interference, and struggled on 
through the sickness and the starving-time, as best 
they could, clearing away the brush, and felling 
trees, and putting up houses. But building 
went on so slowly that in 1619, "In James Cittie 
were only those houses that Sir Thomas Gates 
built in the tyme of his government (16 10), with 
one wherein the governor allwayes dwelt, and a 
church built wholly at the charge of the inhabit- 
ants of the citye, of timber, being fifty foote in 
length and twenty in breadth. " The report from 
the town of Henrico was still less encouraging, for 
there were found only " three old houses, a poor 
ruinated church, with some few poore buildings 
on the islande. " 

Yet, in spite of hindrances and drawbacks, the 
colony prospered. Lord De la Warre reported 
that all the enterprise needed was " a few honest 
laborers burdened with children" ; and such allur- 
ing inducements were held out to immigrants, that 
I cannot understand how the London poor, swarm- 
ing in their black alleys, could resist the invita- 
tion to come over to a land where pure air and 
plenty were to be had for nothing. Ralph Hamor 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

wrote home : " The affairs of the colony being so 
well ordered and the hardest tasks already over- 
past, that whosoever, now or hereafter, shall hap- 
pily arrive there, shall finde a handsome house of 
some four roomes or more, if he have a family, to 
repose himselfe in, rent-free, and twelve English 
acres of ground adjoining thereunto, very strongly 
impailed; which ground is only allotted unto him 
for roots, gardaine-herbs and come ; neither shall 
he need to provide himselfe victuals. He shall 
have for himselfe and family a competent twelve- 
months' provision delivered unto him." In addi- 
tion to all this, the colonist was to be furnished 
with tools of all sorts, and " for his better subsist- 
ence, he shall have poultry and swine, and if he 
prefer, a goate or two, and perhaps a cowe given 
him." I am at a loss to understand why all Eng- 
land did not emigrate at once to the land where 
such a gift-enterprise was on foot. Perhaps the 
readers distrusted Hamor's authority; perhaps 
they thought some extraordinary risks or dangers 
must lurk behind such fair promises, and when 
the Indian massacre came, they possibly nodded 
their wise heads and said, " I told you so." 

The agent of the Maryland Company worked on 
a very different system from this gilded Virginia 
offer. He published a pamphlet giving detailed 
directions to " intending settlers. " They were not 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

to depend on the resources of the colony, even for 
the first year, but to bring with them laborers and 
watch-dogs, grains and seeds of all kinds, and meal 
enough to last while their houses were a-building. 
I find that I gain the best idea of what these first 
houses in America were like, by asking myself 
how I should have built, in the conditions under 
which the settlers worked, dropped down in a 
little forest-clearing, the ocean before and the In- 
dians behind, with few and imperfect tools, and 
with a pressure all the while of securing food for 
to-day, and sowing grain for to-morrow. I am sure 
I should have put up a shelter of the rudest kind 
that could be trusted to withstand the winds of 
Autumn, and the storms of Winter. I should not 
have planed my beams, nor matched my floor- 
boards. Only my doors and shutters I should have 
made both strong and stout, to meet the gales from 
the sea, or a sudden dash from lurking savages in 
the bush. This I find, therefore, without surprise, 
was just what the settlers did. They divided the 
house into a kitchen and a bedroom, with a shed 
joined on for the goats and pigs, or, if the owner 
were so lucky, a cow. Their chimneys were 
chiefly constructed out of twigs plastered on 
both sides with clay, which dried in the sun, and 
served for some time, before it crumbled again to 
dust. As there were no mills, the corn-grinding 

25 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

had to be done at home; so the settlers, learning 
the trick from the Indians, improvised a mortar, by 
burning- out the stump of a tree into a hollow, and 
hanging over it a log, suspended from the limb of 
a tree close at hand, for a pestle. This was hard 
work, and the grinding in the little hand-mills 
brought from England was scarcely easier. A 
dying man, leaving his children to their uncle's 
care, expressly stipulated that they should not be 
put to the drudgery of pounding corn. 

Within the house, stood the great and small 
wheels for wool and flax, the carding-comb and 




the moulds for making those candles, of green 
myrtleberry wax which, as Beverly writes, " are 
never greasie to the touch, nor melt with lying 
in the hottest weather. Neither does the snuff of 

26 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

these ever offend the smell, like that of a tallow- 
candle; but instead of being disagreeable, if an 
accident puts a candle out, it yields a pleasant fra- 
grancy to all that are in the room, insomuch that 
nice people often put them out on purpose to have 
the incense of the expiring snuff. " 

It was no pitiable life that those pioneers lived, 
even in those most primitive days. Their out-of- 
door existence was full of a wild charm, and their 
energy soon improved conditions indoors. Every 
ship from England brought over conveniences 
and luxuries. The cabin was exchanged for a 
substantial house. First pewter, and then silver 
plate began to shine on sideboards of polished 
oak. Four-post bedsteads decorated the sleeping 
rooms, and tapestry curtains kept out the cold. 

A Maryland record of 1653 tells of a bargain 
between T. Wilford and Paul Sympson, by which, 
in consideration of twenty thousand pounds of to- 
bacco received from Sympson, Wilford agrees to 
support him for the rest of his life " like a gentle- 
man." This gentleman-like provision consisted of 
a house fifteen feet square, with a Welsh chimney, 
and lined with riven boards; a handsome joined 
bedstead, bedding and curtains ; one small table, 
six stools, and three wainscot chairs; a servant to 
wait on him; meat, apparel, and washing; and 
every year an anker (ten gallons) of drams, one 

27 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

tierce of sack, and a case of English spirits for his 
own use. 

It is hard to imagine what more of luxury, an 
annuity could furnish to a gentleman of the nine- 
teenth century, if indeed Heaven had blessed him 
with a stomach capable of consuming such an " in- 
tolerable deal of sack." 

The next fifty years still further increased the 
elegance of living; and style as well as comfort 
began to be considered. In an inventory of house- 
hold goods belonging to a Virginian in 1698, I 
find included, " a feather-bed, one sett Kittermin- 
ster curtains, and Vallens bedstead, one pair white 
linen sheets with two do. pillow biers, 2 Rusha- 
leather chaires, 5 Rush-bottom chaires, a burning 
glass, a flesk fork, and 6 Alchemy spoones" (al- 
chemy being a mixed metal, originally supposed 
to be gold made by magic). In addition to these 
articles, the list includes a brass skimer and 2 pairs 
of pot-hooks, and, as its crowning glory, " 1 old 
silver Dram-cup." No doubt the possessor had 
sat with his boon companions on many a cold 
night, by the great chimney, plunging the hot 
poker into the fire. — 

"And nursed the loggerhead, whose hissing dip, 
Timed by nice instinct, creamed the mug of flip." 

The house of a planter in Virginia at the end 
of the seventeenth century, was substantial and 

28 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

comfortable. The inventory of such a planter m en - 
tions, as belonging to the homestead, a "parlor 
chamber, chamber over sd. chamber, chamber over 
the parlor, nursery, old nursery, room over the 
Ladyes chamber, Ladyes chamber, entry, store, 
home house quarter, home house, quarter over the 
creek, Smiths shopp, Barne, kitchen, Dary, cham- 
ber over the old Dary, flemings quarter, Robin- 
sons quarter, Whitakers quarter, Black Wallnut 
Quarter." 

By this time, the house of the rich in the towns 
boasted a parlor, but its furnishing was of the 
simplest. A white floor sprinkled with clean 
white sand, large tables, and heavy high-backed 
chairs of solid, dark oak decorated a parlor enough 
for anybody, says the chronicler of Baltimore. 
William Fitzhugh directs Mistress Sarah Bland 
in London (1682) to procure him a suit of tapestry 
hangings for a room twenty feet long, sixteen feet 
wide, and nine feet high ; " and half a dozen chairs 
suitable." 

The kitchen had long ago been separated from 
the dining-room, and, in the better houses, set off 
in a separate building, that its odours might not 
fill the other rooms when warm weather made 
open doors and windows necessary. The dining- 
room, with its broad buffet, its well-filled cel- 
larette, its silver plate, and its quaint old Eng- 

29 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

lish furniture, was generally the pleasantest room 
in the house. Opening out of the dining-room, 
between it and the parlor, ran the wide hall, with 
doors at either end, with carved stairway and pan- 
elled walls, often hung with family portraits. 

Early in the eighteenth century, Spotswood 
came over as Governor of Virginia, and a new era 
of more elaborate living was introduced. His 
"palace" at Williamsburg, according to the con- 
temporary report of the Reverend Hugh Jones — 
not to be taken, however, without a grain of salt — 
was " a magnificent structure, built at the publick 
expense, furnished and beautified with gates, fine 
gardens, offices, walks, a fine canal, orchards, etc," 
and most impressive of all, in those days, when Sir 
Christopher Wren set the architectural fashions, " a 
cupola or lanthorn" illuminated on the King's 
birthnight, or other festival occasion. At Ger- 
manna, a little settlement of Germans clustered 
round the Spotswood iron-works, the Governor 
built him a house so fine that Colonel Byrd speaks 
of it as The Enchanted Castle, and has left an amus- 
ing account of a visit he made him there. " I ar- 
rived," he says, "about three o'clock, and found 
only Mrs. Spotswood at home. I was carried into 
a room elegantly set off with pier glasses, the 
largest of which came soon after to an odd mis- 
fortune. Amongst other favorite animals that 

30 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

cheered this lady's solitude, a brace of tame deer 
ran familiarly about the house, and one of them 
came to stare at me as a stranger. But unluckily, 
spying his own figure in the glass, he made a 
spring over the tea-table that stood under it and 
shattered the glass to pieces, and, falling back upon 
the tea-table, made a terrible fracas." 

What a change is here, from the hewn timbers 
and bare walls and wooden trenchers of the pioneer, 
to enchanted castles and mirrors, and china and 
tea-tables ! 

This Colonel Byrd, who writes so genially of his 
visit to Germanna, was a typical cavalier — not 
godly, but manly — with a keen enjoyment of a 
jest, as the pucker at the corners of the lips in his 
portrait clearly shows, with a hearty good-will 
toward his neighbor and especially his neighbor's 
wife, with a fine, healthy appetite, and a zest for 
all good things to eat and drink. In his boundary- 
line trip to Carolina and his journey to the 
mines, he smacks his lips over the fat things that 
fall in his way. Now it is a prime rasher of 
bacon, fricasseed in rum ; now a capacious bowl of 
bombo. In one and the same paragraph, he tells 
how he commended his family to the care of the 
Almighty, fortified himself with a beefsteak, and 
kissed his landlady for good luck, before setting 
out on his travels. 

31 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

Roughing- it in camp, he dreams of the fine 
breakfast he will make on a fat doe, and a two- 
year-old bear, killed over night. At a stopping- 
place he records, " Our landlady cherished us with 
roast-beef and chicken-pie," Having eaten these 
with a relish, he pours down a basin of chocolate, 
wishes peace to that house, and takes up his line 
of march for home. There is something refreshing 
to our jaded generation in the hearty enjoyment 
that our ancestors took in their food. 

I am struck in all these old gastronomic records 
with the immense amount of meat, in proportion 
to the vegetables used. No wonder gout was a 
common disease, and the overheated blood needed 
to be reduced by cupping and leeching. The out- 
of-door life, the riding and hunting of Maryland 
and Virginia, enabled the men to eat freely and 
drink deep, and the Southern table was always 
lavishly provided. A foreigner having remarked 
of Mrs. Madison that her table was like a Harvest- 
Home, she replied that, as the profusion which 
amused the visitor was the outgrowth of her coun- 
try's prosperity, she was quite willing to sacrifice 
European elegance to Virginia liberality. Good 
housekeeping in those days consisted chiefly in 
setting a bountiful table, and the Colonial dame, 
in spite of her troop of servants, was kept busy in 
planning the meals, the breakfasts of hot bread 

32 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

and griddle-cakes, the afternoon dinner, and " the 
bite before bedtime." To her it fell, to carry the 
keys, to portion out the rations for the negro quar- 
ters, and to lay aside the materials from which the 
turbanned queen of the kitchen should compound 
the savory sausage, the fried chicken, the sauces, 
and dumplings, and cakes, which have made 
Southern cooking famous. 

The domestic life of women on those old planta- 
tions must have been rather monotonous. The 
travellers who visited them, describe them as shar- 
ing little in the amusements of their husbands, and 
brothers, and sons. Chastellux says that, like the 
English, they are very fond of their infants, but 
care little for their children; but the annals and 
biographies do not bear out his statement. George 
Wythe learned his Greek at home, from a Testa- 
ment, while his mother held an English copy in 
her hand and prompted him as he went on. John 
Mason, too, bore through life the impress of his 
mother's influence. He was only seven years old 
when she died, yet through life, "mother's room" 
was perfectly distinct to him, the old chest of draw- 
ers distinguished as gown drawer, shirt drawer, and 
jacket drawer, the closet known as mistress' 
closet, containing his mother's dresses, and another 
cupboard, known as the closet, in which hung a 
small green horsewhip with a silver head, carried 

33 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

by Mrs. Mason when she rode, and on other oc- 
casions used for purposes of correction, so that the 
children nicknamed it "the green doctor." An 
old letter recalls another "mother's room" in those 
eighteenth-century days: " On one side sits the 
chambermaid with her knitting; on the other a 
little colored pet, learning to sew. An old decent 
woman is there, with her table and shears, cutting 
out the negroes' winter clothes, while the old lady 
directs them all, incessantly knitting." 

Home, rather than Church, was the sacred spot 
to the Colonial Cavalier, in spite of his theoretical 
reverence for Mother Church. It was at home 
that most of the baptisms and funerals occurred, 
and Hugh Jones complains that " in houses also 
they most commonly marry, without regard to the 
time of the day, or season of the year." The cen- 
tral idea of the Puritan religion was fear of God; 
the centre of the Cavalier's religion was love of 
man. From this root sprung a radiant cheerful- 
ness, an open-handed liberality, and an unbounded 
hospitality. If it be true that the best ornaments 
of a house are its guests, never were houses more 
brilliantly decorated than those Southern man- 
sions. The names of Brandon, and Berkeley, and 
Westover, and Mont Clare, and Doughoregan call 
up the procession of guests who have walked, and 
danced, and dined, and slept under their roofs. 

34 



\je Minuet 







THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

We see stately men, in lace and ruffles, pacing the 
minuet with powdered dames, in " teacup time of 
hood and hoop, and when the patch was worn." 
We see lovers and maidens, brides and bride- 
grooms spending the honeymoon under the shel- 
tering trees, and patriot Continentals arming in 
their halls for the struggle with the enemies of 
their country. 

Not the lofty alone, but the lowly as well, could 
claim a welcome at those always open doors. In- 
dians, half-breeds, and leather-clad huntsmen hung 
round the kitchen of Greenaway Court, while 
Washington and Lord Fairfax dined in the saloon. 
Not even acquaintance was considered necessary 
to ensure a cordial reception. " The inhabitants," 
wrote Beverly, " are very courteous to travellers, 
who need no other recommendation than being 
human creatures. A stranger has no more to do 
but to inquire upon the road where any gentleman 
or good housekeeper lives, and there he may de- 
pend upon being received with hospitality. This 
good-nature is so general among their people, that 
the gentry, when they go abroad, order their prin- 
cipal servants to entertain all visitors with every- 
thing the plantation affords ; and the poor planters 
who have but one bed, will often sit up, or lie upon 
a form, or couch, all night, to make room for a weary 
traveller to repose himself after his journey. " 

37 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

In Winter, the fire blazed high on the hearth, 
and the toddy hissed in the noggin ; in Summer, the 
basket of fruit stood in the breeze-swept hall, and 
lightly clad black boys tripped in, bearing cool 
tankards of punch and sangaree. The guest need 
only enter in, to be at home. No one was consid- 
ered so contemptible, as he who consented to re- 
ceive money for entertaining visitors. Keeping 
an inn or " ordinary" was looked upon askance, 
and the law dealt with the proprietor rigorously, 
as with one who probably would cheat if he got a 
chance. His charges were carefully regulated, 
and he was subject to fine, and even imprisonment, 
if he went beyond them. A Maryland statute 
provides that " noe Ordinary-Keeper within this 
Province shall at any Time charge anything to 
account for Boles of Punch, but shall only Sell the 
Severall Ingredients to the Said Mixture accord- 
ing to the Rates before in this Act Ascertained." 
A traveller, in those good old days, might ride 
from Maryland to Georgia, and never put up at 
an Ordinary at all, sure, whenever he wished to 
stop by the way, of a cordial welcome at a private 
house. Some planters even kept negroes posted 
at their gate, to give warning of a rider's ap- 
proach, that he might be invited in, and that the 
household might be in readiness to receive him. 

Such promiscuous hospitality could only exist 
38 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

in a- community with a happy faculty for taking- 
life easily, an ability to dispense with the slavery 
to method, and to be contented though things 
went wrong. The fastidious European found some 
of the manners and customs a little trying. " In 
private houses as well as inns," writes a traveller, 
"several people are crowded together in the same 
room ; and in the latter it very commonly happens 
that after you have been some time in bed, a 
stranger of any condition comes into the room, 
pulls off his clothes, and places himself without 
ceremony between your sheets." 

Another visitor says that the Virginia houses 
are spacious, but the apartments are not commo- 
dious, " and they make no ceremony of putting 
three or four persons into the same room, nor do 
these make any objections to being thus heaped 
together. " 

The Colonial Cavalier was gregarious by nature. 
He was warmly social, and, being so much shut off 
by plantation life from intercourse with his fel- 
lows, he welcomed a guest as a special providence, 
to relieve the monotony of his life. The gentle- 
man-planter in affluent circumstances had nothing 
to do, and he did it in a very leisurely way. His 
occupations were such as could be shared by a 
guest. An observant traveller has left us a vivid 
picture of the daily routine of such an individual : 

39 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

" He rises about nine o'clock. He may perhaps 
make an excursion to walk as far as his stable to 
see his horses, which is seldom more than fifty 
yards from his house. He returns to breakfast 
between nine and ten, which is generally tea or 
coffee, bread and butter, and very thin slices of 
venison, ham, or hung beef. He then lies down 
on a pallet on the floor in the coolest room in the 
house, in his shirt and trousers only, with a negro 
at his head, and another to fan him and keep off 
the flies. Between twelve and one, he takes a 
draught of toddy or bombo, a liquor composed of 
water, sugar, rum and nutmeg, which is made 
weak, and kept cool. He dines between two and 
three, and at every table, whatever else there may 
be, a ham and greens, or cabbage, is always a 
standing dish. At dinner he drinks cider, toddy, 
punch, port, claret, and Madeira, which is gener- 
ally excellent here. Having drunk some few 
glasses of wine after dinner, he returns to his 
pallet, with his two blacks to fan him, and contin- 
ues to drink toddy or sangaree all the afternoon. 
He does not always drink tea. Between nine and 
ten in the evening, he eats a light supper of milk 
and fruit or wine, sugar and fruit, etc., and al- 
most immediately retires to bed for the night." 

All this sounds as if Smyth must have made his 
visit to Virginia in midsummer, and fancied that 

40 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

the habits were the same all the year round, as in 
that semi-tropical season. As a picture, it is truer 
of Carolina than of any section farther North. As 
we go South we find the character more indolent, 
the energies more relaxed, and even the houses 
changing their expression. The stately brick 
manor-houses, modelled on the English mansion, 
with their deep mullioned windows and heavy 
doors, give place to Italian villas, with white pil- 
lars and porches gleaming from their green points 
of land up and down the rivers. Under this shady 
porch the planter might lie at his ease, watching 
the boats on the streams as they come and go, 
and breathing the perfume from the garden at his 
feet. The garden of those days was laid out also 
on the Italian pattern, in shapes of horseshoes, or 
stars, or palm-leaves, with avenues leading down 
bordered by tulips trees, with box-hedged paths, 
wherein Corydon and Phyllis might wander, quite 
hidden from the lounger on the portico. In its 
centre stood often a summer-house, where succes- 
sive generations plighted troth, and exchanged 
love-tokens. Everything about the garden, as 
about the house, suggested England. The lawn 
was sown with the seed of the silvery grass, so 
familiar in the great English parks. Even birds 
were imported from the mother country. When 
Spotswood came over, he brought with him a 

41 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

number of larks to delight his ears with their 
familiar strain, but either the climate was unpro- 
pitious, or the stronger native birds resented the 
coming of the foreigners, for the larks died out, 
and left only here and there a lonely descendant 
to startle the traveller as he rode along the solitary 
forest roads at sunrise, with a flow of melody that 
called up the leafy lanes of the old home. 

42 




Sweethearts and Wives 



SWEETE-* 

H£A" 




THE first settlers in America had no homes, 
for the first requisite for a home is a wife. 
They soon learned that " a better half, alone, gives 
better quarters. " The Indian squaws were almost 
the only women known to the voyagers on the 
Susan Constant and her sister ships ; and though the 
adventurers wrote home in glowing terms of their 
dusky charms, they looked askance upon the idea 
of marriage with the heathen natives. We cannot 
help, however, echoing the sentiments of Colonel 
Byrd of Westover, when he says: " Morals and all 
considered, I can't think the Indians much greater 
heathens than the first adventurers," who, he adds, 

45 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

" had they been good Christians, would have had 
the charity to take this only method of converting 
the natives to Christianity. For, after all that 
can be said, a sprightly lover is the most prevail- 
ing missionary that can be sent amongst these, 
or any other infidels. Besides," he proceeds can- 
didly, " the poor Indians would have had less rea- 
son to complain that the English took away their 
lands, if they had received them by way of portion 
with their daughters." 

It was, in truth, a great benefit both to the 
English and to the Indians, when " Bright-Stream- 
Between-two-Hills" — called in the native dialect 
" Pocahontas" — married John Rolfe, with the ap- 
probation of both races. To this union some of the 
proudest families in Virginia trace their descent. 
Poor little Princess ! The first romance of America 
casts its pathetic charm around you. However 
apocryphal the legend of your saving Smith's life, 
it is hard to resist the impression of your cherishing 
a sentimental attachment for the gallant captain, 
and a suspicion that you were tricked into a 
marriage with Rolfe. 

Smith records a sad interview with Pocahontas 
when she was being lionized, under the name of 
Lady Rebecca, as a royal visitor in London. 
"Being about this time preparing to set sail for 
New England," he writes, "I could not stay to 
46 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

do her that service I desired, and she well de- 
served; but, hearing she was at Bradford with 
divers of my friends, I went to see her. After a 
modest salutation without any bow, she turned 
about, obscured her face as not seeming well con- 
tented. But. not long after, she began to talk, and 
remembered me well what courtesies she had done, 
saying: 'You did promise Powhatan what was 
yours should be his, and he the like to you ; you 
called him Father — being in his land a stranger — 
and by the same reason so must I doe you. ' " 
Smith objects on the ground of her royal lineage, 
which had well-nigh brought Rolfe to grief, and 
she responds: "Were you not afraid to come into 
my father's countrie and cause feare in him and 
all his people but mee, and feare you here I should 
call you Father? I tell }^ou then I will; and you 
shall call me childe ; and soe will I be forever and 
ever your countrieman. They did tell me always 
you were dead, and I knew no other till I came to 
Plymouth. Yet Powhatan did command Ottama- 
tomakkin to seek you and know the truth, because 
your countriemen will lie much." So ended the 
parting; and soon afterward the poor little Prim 
cess died a stranger in a strange land. " She came 
to Gravesend, to her end and grave." 

The first English wedding on American soil was 
solemnized between John Laydon, a laborer, and 

47 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

Anne Buras, maid to Mistress Forest. They 
were "marry'd together" in 1608. Eleven years 
later came a ship bearing " ye maides," a company 
of ninety young women, "pure and uncorrupt," 
sent over to Virginia, at the expense of the com- 
pany in London, to be married to such settlers as 
were able and willing to support them, and to re- 
fund to the company the cost of passage. A little 
later, sixty more "maides" followed; and though 
the cost of a wife rose from a hundred and twenty, to 
a hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco, there was 
no slackening in the demand. In Maryland, as late 
as 1660, the market was equally brisk. " The first 
planters," says the record, "were so far from ex- 
pecting money with a woman, that 'twas a common 
thing for them to buy a deserving wife, that carried 
good testimonials of her character, at the price of a 
hundred pound, and make themselves believe they 
had a bargain." 

We read of an adventurous young lady of some 
social consequence, being a niece of Daniel 
Defoe, who, suffering from an unfortunate love- 
affair in England, ran away from home, and 
came to Maryland as a "redemptioner." Her ser- 
vices were engaged by a farmer named Job, in Cecil 
County, and soon after, according to a frequent 
custom of the country, she married into the family 
of her employer. A Maryland record of Novem- 

48 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

ber 2, 1638, runs thus: "This day came William 
Lewis, planter, and made oath that he is not re- 
contracted to any other woman than Ursula Gif- 
ford; and that there is no impediment why he 
should not be married to the said Ursula Gifford 
— and, further, he acknowledged himself to owe 
unto the Lord Proprietary a thousand pounds of 
tobacco, in case there be any precontract or other 
lawful impediment whatsoever, as aforesaid, either 
on the part of William Lewis or Ursula Gifford." 

This arrangement of making the bridegroom re- 
sponsible for the good faith of the lady as well as 
his own, is quite refreshing in these days of equal 
rights and responsibilities. The woman's rights 
question, however, was at the front in Maryland, 
in the seventeenth century ; and the strong-minded 
woman who introduced it, was Mistress Margaret 
Brent, cousin to Governor Calvert, who had such 
confidence in her business sagacity and ability, that 
he appointed her his executrix, with the brief in- 
structions, "Take all: pay all." She made ap- 
plication to the Maryland Assembly to grant her a 
vote in the House for herself, and another as his 
Lordship's attorney. The request was peremp- 
torily refused by Governor Greene; but, nothing 
daunted, " the sd. Mrs Brent protested against all 
proceedings in this present assembly unlesse shee 
may be present and have a vote as aforesaid." 

49 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

Another woman of force in those days was Vir- 
linda Stone. In the Maryland archives still ex- 
ists a letter from her to Lord Baltimore, praying 
for an investigation of a fight in Anne Arundel 
County, during which her husband was wounded. 
At the end of the business-like document, she 
adds a fiery and altogether feminine postscript, in 
which she declares that " Hemans, the master of 
the Golden Lion, is a very knave: and that will be 
made plainly for to appeare to your Lordship, for 
he hath abused my husband most grossly." Such 
women as these were not to be trifled with. No 
wonder Alsopsays: "All complimental courtships 
drest up in critical Rarities are meer strangers to 
them. Plain wit comes nearest to their genius; 
so that he that intends to court a Maryland girle, 
must have something more than the tautologies of 
a long-winded speech to carry on his design, or 
else he may fall under the contempt of her frown 
and his own windy discourse." 

The Virginia women were as high-spirited as 
their Maryland sisters. They had no idea of being 
commanded into matrimony. v When Governor 
Nicholson became infatuated with one of the fair 
daughters of Master Lewis Burwell and demanded 
her hand with royally autocratic manner, neither 
she nor her parents were disposed to comply. The 
suitor became furious, and persisted for years in 

50 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

his determination, which seems to have been as 
much a matter of pride, as of sentiment. He took 
pains to wreak his wrath on every one who opposed 
the match, going- so far as to threaten the lives of 
the unwilling young woman's father and brother. 
To Commissary Blair he declared that, if she mar- 
ried any one but himself, he would cut the throats 
of three men — the bridegroom, the minister, and 
the justice who issued the license. Strangely 
enough, the damsel was not attracted by this wild 
wooing; and, as a candid friend wrote to the furi- 
ous lover, " It is not here, as in some barbarous 
countries, where the tender lady is dragged into 
the Sultan's arms reeking with the blood of her 
relatives." Though this affair created such a stir 
throughout the Colony of Virginia and lasted so 
long a time, no record has remained of the young 
heroine's after fate, except the fact that she did 
not become Lady Nicholson; not even her Chris- 
tian name has come down to posterity, to whom 
she remains a shadowy divinity. 

A noticeable feature of Colonial life in Virginia, 
is the belleship of widows. The girls seem to have 
stood no chance against their fascinations. Wash- 
ington, and Jefferson, and Madison each married 
one. In the preceding century, Sir William Berke- 
ley, who had brought no lady with him across the 
water, was taken captive by a young widow of War- 

51 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

wick County, a certain Dame Frances Stevens, 
who, after thirty-two years of married life, being 
again left a widow by Berkeley's death, wedded 
with her late husband's secretary, Philip Ludwell 
— holding fast, however, to her title of Lady 
Berkeley. Lord Culpeper writes in a letter of 
1680, " My Lady Berkeley is married to Mr. Lud- 
well; and thinks no more of our world." It is to 
be hoped that the secretary whom the lady took 
for her third husband, proved a more amiable 
companion than the fiery old Governor, whose 
pride and bitter obstinacy wrought such havoc 
after Bacon's rebellion, that the reports of his 
cruelties echoed to the shores of England. Ed- 
mund Cheesman, a follower of Bacon's, being 
brought up for trial, Berkeley asked him: "Why 
did you engage in Bacon's designs?" Before 
Cheesman could answer, his young wife, falling on 
her knees, exclaimed : " My provocation made my 
husband join in the cause for which Bacon con- 
tended. But for me he had never done what he 
has done. Let me bear the punishment, but let 
my husband be pardoned!" Where was the chiv- 
alry of that Cavalier blood on which Berkeley 
prided himself? We read that her prayer availed 
her husband nothing, and procured only insult to 
herself. 

Our sympathy with Bacon, in his rebellion 
52 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

against Berkeley's tyranny, makes us doubly re- 
gretful that he should have stained his career by 
a deed of cowardice and cruelty. It was one of 
those blunders worse than crimes, and gave him 
and his followers the contemptuous appellation of 
" White Aprons. " When Bacon made his sudden 
turn on Sir William Berkeley, he established his 
headquarters at Green Spring, Berkeley's own man- 
sion. There he threw up breastworks in front 
of his palisades, and then sent out detachments of 
horsemen, who scoured the country and brought 
back to camp the wives of prominent Berkeleyites. 
Among these dames were Madam Bray, Madam 
Page, Madam Ballard, and Madam Bacon — the last, 
the wife of the rebel's kinsman. Bacon then sent 
one of the dames to the town under a flag of truce, 
to inform the husbands that he intended to place 
them in front of his men while he constructed his 
earthworks. " The poor gentlewomen were might- 
ily astonished, and neather were their husbands 
void of amazement at this subtile invention. The 
husbands thought it indeed wonderful that their 
innocent and harmless wives should thus be en- 
tered a white garde to the Divell" — the Divell, of 
course, being General Bacon, who, thus protected 
by The White Aprons, finished his fortifications in 
security; gaining a reputation for "subtility," but 
tarnishing his character for gallantry. 

53 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

As society grew more stable, it grew also more 
complex. The buying of wives gave way to 
sentimental courtships, and men also began to 
learn the advantages of a single life. In Mary- 
land so many took this view, that we find the old 
statutes imposing a tax on bachelors over twenty- 
five years of age, of five shillings, for estates under 
three hundred pounds sterling, or twenty shillings 
when over ; a tax which seems to have been more 
successful as a means of raising money than of pro- 
moting matrimony ; for we find the record of its 
payment by a surprising number of bachelors, St. 
Ann's parish vestry-books alone showing thirty- 
four such derelicts. Perhaps, however, this celib- 
acy did not indicate so much aversion to mar- 
riage, as inability to meet the growing demands 
for luxury. The obstinate bachelors may have felt 
with regard to matrimony as Alsop did with 
regard to liberty, that " without money it is like 
a man opprest with the gout — every step he takes 
forward puts him to pain." The Abbe Robin at 
a later day says of Annapolis : " Female luxury 
here exceeds what is known in the provinces of 
France. A French hair-dresser is a man of impor- 
tance ; it is said a certain dame here, hires one of 
that craft at a thousand crowns a year salary." 
The very rumors of such extravagance must have 
frightened frugal young men ! 

54 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

The Colonial maiden came into society and 
married, at an age which now seems surprisingly 
early. Chief-Justice Marshall met and fell in 
love with his wife when she was fourteen, and 
married her at sixteen. An unmarried woman of 
over twenty-five, was looked upon as a hopeless 
and confirmed old maid and spoken of, like Miss 
Wilkins, of Boston, as "a pitiable spectacle." It 
may be that this extreme youth of the maids ex- 
plains the attraction of the widows, who had more 
social experience. Burnaby writes in a very un- 
handsome manner of his impressions of the Vir- 
ginia ladies whom he met in his American tour, and 
generalizes with true British freedom on slight 
acquaintance with the facts. He admits grudg- 
ingly that ths women of Virginia are handsome, 
"though not to be compared with our fair coun- 
trywomen in England. They have but few advan- 
tages, and consequently are seldom accomplished. 
This makes them reserved and unequal to any 
interesting or refined conversation. They are 
immoderately fond of dancing, and, indeed, it is 
almost the only amusement they partake of; but 
even in this, they discover great want of taste and 
elegance, and seldom appear with that gracefulness 
and ease which these movements are so calculated 
to display. Toward the close of an evening, when 
the company are pretty well tired with contra- 

55 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

dances, it is usual to dance jigs — a practice origin- 
ally borrowed, I am informed, from the negroes. 
The Virginia ladies, excepting these amusements, 
and now and then a party of pleasure into the 
woods to partake of a barbecue, cheerfully spend 
their time in sewing and taking care of their 
families." 

Another traveller makes a better report, and 
draws more favorable conclusions. 

" Young women are affable with young men in 
America," he writes, "and married women are 
reserved, and their husbands are not as familiar 
with the girls as they were, when bachelors. If a 
young man were to take it into his head that his 
betrothed should not be free and gay in her social 
intercourse, he would run the risk of being dis- 
carded, incur the reputation of jealousy, and would 
find it very difficult to get married. Yet if a sin- 
gle woman were to play the coquette, she would 
be regarded with contempt. As this innocent 
freedom between the sexes diminishes in propor- 
tion as society loses its purity and simplicity of 
manners, as is the case in cities, I desire sincerely 
that our good Virginia ladies may long retain 
their liberty entire." 

The Colonial age was the day of elaborate com- 
pliment. Gentlemen took time to turn their sen- 
tences and polish them neatly, and ladies heard 

56 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

them to the end without suggesting by a word or 
glance that the climax had been foreseen for the 
last five minutes, at least. An essay on Wo?nan y by 
a certain Mr. Thomas, had a great vogue in the 
eighteenth century, and antedated Tupper's Poems 
as a well of sentimental quotation. The Spectator 
and The Tattler gave the tone to society literature, 
and enabled the provincial dame to reflect accu- 
rately the Lady Betty Modish of London. The 
beaux, too, took many a leaf from The Spectator in 
the study of a compliment. When I read of the 
Colonial maiden poring over the tiny glaze-paper 
note accompanying a book entitled " The Art of 
Loving" — in which the writer declares it to be 
" most convenient, presenting the art of Loving to 
one who so fully possesses the art of Pleasing" — I 
am carried back to the days of Sir Charles Grand- 
ison. 

There is a marked contrast in the social chroni- 
cles of the eighteenth century at home and abroad, 
between what the gentlemen said to the ladies and 
what they said about them. That wicked Colonel 
Byrd, for instance, after making himself agree- 
able to Governor Spotswood's ladies the whole 
evening, writes in his journal that their con- 
versation was "like whip sillabub — very pretty, 
but with nothing in it." Again he describes 
himself patronizingly as "prattling with the 

57 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

ladies after a nine o'clock supper." Yet, under- 
neath all the superficial bowing and scraping 
of courtesy and compliment, and the jesting 
asides at the expense of the fair sex, it must be 
set down to the Cavalier's credit that he treated 
womankind with a great tenderness and respect. 
Woman's influence made itself felt in private and 
in public — in the Council, in the Virginia House 
of Burgesses, and in the Assemblies of Maryland 
and of Carolina. 

The pride and folly of Governor Tryon of Caro- 
lina led him to make a demand on the Assembly 
for an extensive appropriation for the building of 
a palace at Newbern suitable for the residence of 
a royal Governor. To obtain this appropriation, 
Lady Tryon and her sister, the beautiful Esther 
Wake, used all their blandishments. Lady Tryon 
gave brilliant balls and dinners, and her sister's 
bright eyes rained influence to such good purpose, 
that the first appropriation and as much more was 
granted, and the palace was pronounced the most 
magnificent structure in America. The palace is 
fallen — its marble mantels, its colonnades, its 
carved staircases are in ruins ; but the name of 
beautiful Esther Wake is preserved in Wake 
County. 

The chronicles of the Carolinas are full of ro- 
mance. Here, at Cross Creek, dwelt Flora Mac- 

58 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

Donald, the heroic rescuer of the Pretender after 
the disasters of Culloden. It seems a strange 
chance that brought her from such exciting mas- 
querades, from the companionship of kings and 
the role of heroine on the stage of the great world, 
to the pioneer's cottage in the wild woods of the 
Western wilderness. The only drawback to her 
career in eighteenth century eyes was that she 
married and lived happy ever after. The romance 
of that day demanded a broken heart, and tragedy 
was always in high favor. Every locality had its 
story of blighted love and life. The Dismal 
Swamp, lying on the border between Virginia and 
Maryland, was a sort of Gretna Green, where many 
runawa3>- marriages were celebrated. Tradition 
tells of a lover whose sweetheart died suddenly; 
and he, driven mad by grief, fancied that she had 
gone to the Dismal Swamp, where he perished in 
the search for her. 

When Tom Moore was in this country he was 
impressed by the legend, and set it thus to the 
music — let us not dare to say the jingle — of his 
verse : 

They made her a grave too cold and damp 

For a soul so warm and true, 
And she's gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp, 
Where all night long, by her fire-fly lamp 

She paddles her white canoe. 

• 59 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see, 

Her paddle I soon shall hear. 
Long and loving our life shall be, 
And I'll hide the maid in a cypress tree, 

When the footsteps of Death draw near. 

Real life had its tragedies, too. In the deep 
wainscoted hall of the Brandon Mansion hangs a 
portrait of lovely Evelyn Byrd. She sits on a green 
bank, with a handful of roses and a shepherd's 
crook in her lap — her soft, dark eyes look out in 
pensive sadness as though they could, if they would, 
tell the story of a maiden's heart and a life ended 
untimely by unhappy love. One story says she 
broke her heart for Parke Custis, who left her to 
wear the willow, and married afterward the Martha 
Dandridge, who in the whirligig of time became 
Lady Washington. Another rumor connects her 
name with that of the Earl of Peterborough, who 
loved her deeply, so the story runs; but his creed 
was not hers, and her father, Colonel Byrd, would 
not consent to the marriage. The maiden yielded 
to her father's will, but pined away and died; and 
there, in the Westover burying-ground, she lies un- 
der a ponderous stone, which records this epitaph : 

"Alas, Reader, 
We can detain nothing, however valued, 
From unrelenting death, 
Beauty, Fortune, or exalted Honour — 
See here a proof!" 

60 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

I cannot help feeling that all these might have 
been detained on earth to a ripe age, had the 
maiden been left free to decide the most important 
question of her life to her liking; for, in a letter 
written by Colonel Byrd when Evelyn was a slip 
of a girl, I read concerning the maiden, " She has 
grown a great romp and enjoys robust health." 
Yet a few years later, the robust romp has faded to 
a shadow, and is laid away in the family grave- 
yard, and only her portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 
remains to appeal to the sentiment and sympathy 
of posterity. 

The gentle Evelyn Byrd was not the only one 
whom the traditions of the Colonial Cavalier credit 
with carrying to the grave a heart scarred with the 
wounds of unhappy love. Lord Fairfax, who lived 
to be over sixty and kept open house at Belvoir, 
where Washington visited him and kept him com- 
pany in riding to hounds over hill and dale; Lord 
Fairfax — with his gaunt, tall frame ; his gray, near- 
sighted eyes, and prominent aquiline nose, little 
outward resemblance as he might bear to the orig- 
inal of the almond-eyed portrait at Brandon — re- 
sembled her at least in a wounded heart and a 
broken career. In his youth, this solitary Vir- 
ginia recluse had been a brilliant man-about-town 
in the gay world of London. He had held a com- 
mission in "the Blues"; he had known the famous 

63 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

men of the day, he had dabbled in literature, 
and contributed a paper now and then to the 
Spectator. When his career of fashion was at its 
height, he paid his addresses to a young lady of 
rank and was accepted. The day for the wed- 
ding was fixed — the establishment furnished, even 
to equipage and servants — when the inconstant 
bride-elect, dazzled by a ducal coronet, broke 
her engagement. The blow wrought a complete 
change in the jilted lover. From that time he 
shrank from the society of all women, and finally 
came over to Virginia to hide his hurt in the 
Western forests. 

Spite of such traditions of melancholy, the actual 
career of most of the people of those times forms 
a curious contrast to the ideals of their poetry and 
fiction. With scarcely an exception, they survived 
their unsuccessful love affairs, and lived in pros- 
perous serenity with others than the first rulers of 
their hearts. 

There is Jefferson, for instance. Almost the 
first letter in his published correspondence is de- 
voted to a confession of his tender passion for a 
young lad)^ dwelling in the town of Williamsburg. 
Yet her name is not the one that stands next his 
own on the marriage register. This first love of 
his was a Miss 'Becca Burwell. We chance upon 
the young collegian's secret as we open his letter 

64 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER.' 

to John Page, written on Christmas day, 1762. He 
begins jocularly enough, yet only half in fun after 
all : " I am sure if there is such a thing as a Devil 
in this world, he must have been here last night, 
and have had some hand in contriving what hap- 
pened to me. Do you think the cursed rats (at 
his instigation, I suppose) did not eat up my pocket- 
book, which was in my pocket, within a foot of my 
head? And not contented with plenty for the 
present, they carried away my jemmy- worked silk 
garters and half a dozen new minuets I had just 
got. " " Tell Miss Alice Corbin, " he adds, " that I 
verily believe the rats knew I was to win a pair 
of garters from her, or they never would have been 
so cruel as to carry mine away." 

Christmas day, indeed, found him in sorry case. 
These losses he could have borne, but worse re- 
mained to tell : " You know it rained last night, 
or if you do not know it, I am sure I do. When 
I went to bed I laid my watch in the usual place; 
and going to take her up after I arose this morning, 
I found her in the same place, 'tis true, but — 
quantum mutatus ab Mo — all afloat in water, let in 
at a leak in the roof of the house, and as silent and 
still as the rats that had eat my pocket-book. Now, 
you know, if chance had had anything to do in this 
matter, there were a thousand other spots where it 
might have chanced to leak as well as this one, 

65 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

which was perpendicularly over my watch. But, 
I'll tell you, it's my opinion that the Devil came and 
bored the hole over it on purpose." It was not the 
injury to his timepiece which drew forth these vio- 
lent, half-real, half-jesting objurgations; no, there 
was a sentimental reason behind. The water had 
soaked a watch-paper and a picture, so that when 
he attempted to remove them, he says : " My cursed 
fingers gave them such a rent as I fear I shall never 
get over. I would have cried bitterly, but that I 
thought it beneath the dignity of a man!" The 
mystery of the original of the picture and the 
maker of the watch-paper is soon explained, for a 
page or two further on, he trusts that Miss 'Becca 
Burwell will give him another watch-paper of her 
own cutting, which he promises to esteem much 
more, though it were a plain round one, than the 
nicest in the world cut by other hands. " How- 
ever," he adds, "I am afraid she would think this 
presumption, after my suffering the other to get 
spoiled." 

A very real and tumultuous passion this of 
young Tom Jefferson's! Every letter he writes 
to his friend teems with reference to her. Now 
she is R. B. ; again Belinda; and again, with that 
deep secrecy of dog Latin so dear to the col- 
legian, she figures as Campana in die (bell in 
day) ; or, still more mysteriously, as Adnileb, writ- 

66 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

ten in Greek that the vulgar world may not pry 
into the sacred secret. Oh, youth, youth, how like 
is the nineteenth century to the eighteenth, and 
that to its preceding, till we reach the courtship of 
Adam and Eve! 

In October, '63, he writes to his old con- 
fidant: "In the most melancholy fit that ever 
any poor soul was, I sit down to write you. Last 
night, as merry as agreeable company and dancing 
with Belinda in the Apollo could make me, I never 
could have thought the succeeding sun could 
have seen me so wretched as I now am! . . . 
I was prepared to say a great deal.. I had dressed 
up in my own mind such thoughts as occurred to 
me in as moving a language as I knew how, and 
expected to have performed in a tolerably credita- 
ble manner. But, good God ! when I had an op- 
portunity of venting them, a few broken sentences, 
uttered in great disorder and interrupted with 
pauses of uncommon length, were the too visible 
marks of my strange confusion." The framer of 
the Declaration of Independence, whose eloquence 
startled the world, found himself tongue-tied and 
stammering in a declaration of love to a provincial 
maiden. 

At twenty-nine or thirty Jefferson had re- 
covered enough to go a-courting again, to Mistress 
Martha Skelton, a young and childless widow, of 

67 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

such great beauty that many rivals contested 
with him the honor of winning her hand. The 
story goes that two of these rivals met one even- 
ing in Mrs. Skelton's drawing-room. While wait- 
ing for her to enter, they heard her singing in 
an adjoining room, to the accompaniment of 
Jefferson's violin. The love-song was so expres- 
sively executed that the admirers perceived that 
their doom was sealed, and, picking up their 
cocked hats, they stole out without waiting for 
the lady. 

If Jefferson in his younger days was soft-hearted 
toward the gentler sex, his susceptibility was as 
nothing compared to Washington's. The senti- 
mental biography of that great man would be more 
entertaining than the story of his battles, or his 
triumphs of government. There are evidences in 
his own handwriting that, before he was fifteen 
years old, he had conceived a passion for a fair un- 
known beauty, so serious as to disturb his otherwise 
well-regulated mind, and make him seriously un- 
happy. His sentimental poems written at that 
age, are neither better nor worse than the produc- 
tions of most boys of fifteen. One of them hints 
that bashfulness has prevented his divulging his 
passion : 

"Ah, woe is me, that I should love and conceal ! 
Long have I wished and never dare reveal." 
63 



IHE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

At the mature age of sixteen, he writes to his 
"dear friend Robin": " my residence is at present 
at his Lordship's, where I might, was my heart dis- 
engaged, pass my time very pleasantly, as there's 
a very agreeable young lady lives in the same 
house; but as that's only adding fuel to the fire, it 
makes me the more uneasy ; for by often and un- 
avoidably ( !) being in company with her, revives 
my former passion for your Lowland Beauty; 
whereas, was I to live more retired from young 
women, I might in some measure alleviate my 
sorrows by burying that chaste and troublesome 
passion in the grave of oblivion. " This " chaste and 
troublesome passion" had subsided enough, when 
he went as a young officer to New York in all the 
gorgeousness of uniform and trappings, to enable 
him to fall in love with Miss Mary Phillipse, whom 
he met at the house of her sister, Mrs. Beverly 
Robinson. She was gay, she was rich, she was 
beautiful, and Washington might have made her 
the offer of his heart and hand ; but suddenly an ex- 
press from Winchester brought word to New York 
of a French and Indian raid, and young Washing- 
ton hastened to rejoin his command, leaving the 
capture of the lady to Captain Morris. Three years 
later we find him married to the Widow Custis, 
with two children and a fortune of fifteen thousand 
pounds sterling. Shortly after, he writes of him- 

69 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

self from Mount Vernon, temperately enough, as 
" fixed in this seat with an agreeable partner for 
life," and we hear no more of amatory verses in 
honor of his Lowland Beauty, or flirtations with 
fashionable young dames in New York. But when 
the Marquis de Chastellux announced his marriage, 
Washington wrote him in a vein of humor rather 
foreign to him, and bespeaking a genial sympathy 
in his expectations of happiness. " I saw by the 
eulogium you often made on the happiness of do- 
mestic life in America," he writes, "that you had 
swallowed the bait, and that you would as surely be 
taken one day or other, as that you were a philoso- 
pher and a soldier. So your day has at length 
come! I am glad of it with all my heart and 
soul. It is quite good enough for you. Now 
you are well served for coming to fight in favor 
of the American rebels all the way across the 
Atlantic Ocean, by catching that terrible con- 
tagion — domestic felicity — which, like the small- 
pox or plague, a man can have only once in his 
life." 

Of all the joyous festivals among the Southern 
Colonists, none was so mirthful as a wedding. 
The early records of the wreck of the Sea Venture 
and the tedious and dangerous delay on the Ber- 
mudas mention that in even that troublous time 
they held one " merry English wedding. " In any 

70 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

new land marriages and births are joyful events. 
All that is needed for prosperity is multiplication 
of settlers, and so it is quite natural that the set- 
ting up of a new household should be celebrated 
with rejoicing and merry-making. 

In one respect the colonists broke with the home 
traditions. They insisted on holding their mar- 
riage ceremonies at home rather than in church, 
and no minister could move their determination. 
As civilization advanced, and habits grew more 
luxurious, the marriage festivities grew more 
elaborate and formal. The primitive customs 
gave way to pomp and display, till at length a 
wedding became an affair of serious expense. 
"The house of the parents," says Scharf in his 
"Chronicles of Baltimore," "would be filled with 
company to dine ; the same company would stay 
to supper. For two days punch was dealt out in 
profusion. The gentlemen saw the groom on the 
first floor, and then ascended to the second floor, 
where they saw the bride ; there every gentleman, 
even to one hundred a day, kissed her." 

A Virginia wedding in the olden time was a 
charming picture — the dancers making merry in 
the wide halls or on the lawn ; the black servants 
dressed in fine raiment for the occasion and 
showing their white teeth in that enjoyment only 
possible to a negro; the jolly parson acting at 

7i 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

once as priest and toast-master ; the groom in ruf- 
fles and velvet, and the bride in brocade and 
jewels. Never again will our country have so 
picturesque a scene to offer. Let us recall it 
while we may ! 

72 



His Dress 




His Dress- 

In teacup time of nood and hoop 



I 



And when the patch was worn 

F you have any curiosity to 
know what clothes these 
first Colonial Cavaliers wore, 
you may learn ver} 7 easily by 
reading over the " particular of 
Apparrell " upon which they 
agreed as necessary to the set- 
tler bound for Virginia. 
The list includes : " i dozen Points, a Monmouth 
cap, i waste-coat, 3 falling bands, 1 suit of can- 
vase, 3 shirts, 1 suit of frieze, 1 suit of cloth, 4 
paire shoes, 3 paire Irish stockings, and 1 paire 
garters." Besides these he would need " 1 Armor 
compleat, light, a long peece, a sword, a belt and 
a Bandelier," which may be reckoned among his 
wearing apparel, for it would be long before the 
settler could be safe without them when he ven- 
tured outside the palisade. 

Englishmen in those days were fond of elaborate 
dress. It was the period of conical hats, and ro- 
setted shoes, of doublets and sashes and padded 
trunk-hose, which his Majesty, James the First, 

75 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

much affected because they filled out his ill-shaped 
legs. Suits of clothes were a frequent form of gift 
and bequest. Captain John Smith's will declares, 
" I give unto Thomas Packer, my best suite of 
aparrell, of a tawney colour, viz., hose, doublet, 
jerkin and cloake." 

The peruke began its all-conquering career in 
England, under the Stuarts. Elizabeth, it is true, 
had owned eighty suits of hair, and Mary of Scot- 
land had varied her hair to match her dresses. 
But a defect of the French Dauphin introduced the 
use of the wig for men as well as women, and 
false hair became the rage throughout the world 
of fashion. A London peruke-maker advertised : 
" Full-bottom wigs, full bobs, minister's bobs, nat- 
urals, half-naturals, Grecian flyes, Curleyroys, 
airey levants, qu perukes and baggwiggs. " The 
customer must have been hard to please, who could 
find nothing to suit his style in such a stock. 

The settlers in Colonial America did not allow 
themselves such luxuries of the toilet as a variety 
of wigs, though a well-planned peruke or " a bob" 
might have been a good device to trick the toma- 
hawk of the savage into a bloodless scalping. With 
the poorer people, a single wig for Sunday wear 
sufficed, and was replaced on week days by a cap, 
generally of linen. 

The Colonial dames, being too far from Court to 
76 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

copy the low-necked dresses, the stomachers and 
farthingales of the inner circle of fashion, wore 
instead, huge ruffs, full, short petticoats, and long, 
flowing sleeves, over tight undersleeves. Even in 
the wilderness, however, they retained a feminine 
fondness for gay attire. 

John Pory, a clever scapegrace intimately ac- 
quainted with gaming-tables and sponging-houses 
in London, but figuring in Virginia as secretary 
to Governor Yeardley, wrote home to Sir Dudley 
Carleton, " That your Lordship may know that we 
are not the veriest beggars in the world, our cow- 
keeper here of James Cittie, on Sundays goes ac- 
coutred all in fresh flaming silk, and a wife of 
one that in England professed the black art, not 
of a scholar but of a collier of Croydon, wears her 
rough beaver hat with a fair pearl hat-band and a 
silken suit, thereto correspondent." 

Lively John was probably lying a little in the 
cause of immigration, but it is certain that the 
desire for fine clothes early called for a check, and 
at an early session of the Virginia House of Bur- 
gesses, a sumptuary law was passed " against 
excess in apparell," directing "that every man 
be ceffed in the church for all publique con- 
tributions — if he be unmarried, according to his 
own apparrell ; if he be married, according to his 
own and his wives, or either of their apparell." 

77 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

Here, surely, is a suggestion from the past, for 
the fashionable church of the present. 

A later law in the provinces enacts that "no 
silke stuffe in garments or in peeces, except for 
hoods or scarfes, nor silver or gold lace, nor bone- 
lace of silke or thread, nor ribbands wrought with 
silver or gold in them, shall be brought into this 
country to sell, after the first of February." A 
Maryland statute proposes that two sorts of 
"cloaths" only be worn, one for summer, the 
other for winter. But this was going too far, and 
the law was never enforced. 

It was permitted to none but Members of the 
Council and Heads of Hundreds in Virginia to 
wear the coveted gold on their clothes, or to wear 
any silk not made by themselves. This last pro- 
hibition was intended not so much to discourage 
pomp and pride, as to stimulate the infant indus- 
try of silk production, which from the beginning- 
had been a pet scheme of the colonists. They had 
imported silk-worms and planted mulberry trees ; 
and as an inducement to go into the business, the 
Burgesses offered a premium of five thousand 
pounds of tobacco to any one making a hundred 
pounds of wound silk in any one year. 

His Gracious Majesty, Charles the Second, sent 
to his loyal subjects in Virginia, a letter, still to 
be seen in the college library at Williamsburg. It 

78 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

is written by his Majesty's private secretary and 
signed with the sacred "Charles R." It is ad- 
dressed to Governor Berkeley, and runs: 

" Trusty & Wellbeloved, We Greet You Well. 
Wee have received w th much content ye dutifull 
respects of Our Colony in y e prefent lately made 
us by you & y e councell there, of y e firf t product of 
y e new Manufacture of Silke, which as a mark of 
Our Princely acceptation of yo r duteys & for y r 
particular encouragement, etc.— Wee have com- 
manded to be wrought up for y e ufe of Our owne 
perfon. " 

From this letter has sprung the legend, dear to 
loyalist hearts, that the robe worn by Charles at 
his coronation was woven of Virginia silk. 

So much material was needed " for y e use of our 
owne person," that the offering of silk was no 
doubt very welcome. The King's favorite, Buck- 
ingham, had twenty-seven suits, one of them of 
white uncut velvet, set all over with diamonds 
and worn with diamond hat-bands, cockades and 
ear-rings, and yoked with ropes and knots of 
pearls. 

It was an era of wild extravagance. Not satis- 
fied with the elegance of the time of Charles First, 
his son's courtiers added plumes to the wide- 
brimmed hats, enlarged the bows on the shoes, 
donned great wigs, loaded their vests with em- 

79 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

broidery, and over their coats hung short cloaks, 
worth a fortune. 

The women dressed as befitted the court of a 
dissolute king-. Their artificial curls were trained 
in " heart-breakers" and " love-locks. " The white- 
ness of their skin was enhanced by powder and set 
off by patches. Their shoulders rose above bodices 
of costly brocade hung with jewels which had 
sometimes ruined both buyer and wearer. 

The Puritans, by their opposition to the Court, 
escaped the evil influences of these extravagances. 
But the Colonial Cavaliers, who bowed before the 
King lower than the courtiers at home, of course 
imitated his dress, so far as their fortunes allowed. 
Every frigate that came into port at Jamestown or 
St. Maries brought the latest London fashions. A 
little before Colonel Fitzhugh in Virginia was or- 
dering his Riding Camblet cloak from London, 
Mr. Samuel Pepys was writing in his journal, 
" This morning came home my fine camlete cloak 
with gold buttons." While this gentleman was 
attiring himself in his new shoulder-belt and 
tunique laced with silk, "and so very handsome 
to church," Sir William Berkeley and Governor 
Calvert were opening their eyes of a Sunday morn- 
ing three thousand miles away, and making ready 
to get into their rosetted shoes, and to lace their 
breeches and hose together with points as fanciful 

80 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

as his, and, like him, perhaps, having their heads 
" combed by y e maide for powder and other troubles." 
No doubt Lady Berkeley, in her fine lace bands, 
her coverchef and deep veil, was as fine as Madam 
Pepys in her paragon pettycoat and "just a corps" 

With the beginning of the eighteenth century, 
the hoop appeared, and carried all before it, in 
more senses than one. "The ladies' petticoats," 
I read in the notes of a contemporary of the fash- 
ion, " are now blown up into a most enormous 
concave. " Over this concave the ladies wore, on 
ceremonious occasions, such as a ball at Governor 
Spotswood's or an assembly at Annapolis, trailing 
gowns of heavy brocade, many yards in length. 
Dragging these skirts behind, and bearing aloft 
on their heads a towering structure of feathers, 
ribbons and lace, it was no wonder these dames 
preferred slow and stately measures. At their 
side, or as near as the spreading hoop permitted, 
moved their favored cavaliers, their coat-skirts 
stiff with buckram, their swords dangling between 
their knees, their breeches of red plush or black 
satin, so tight that they fitted without a wrinkle. 

Men of that day took their dress very seriously. 
Washington, who had doubtless gained many ideas 
of fashion from the modish young officers of Brad- 
dock's army, ordered his costumes with as much 
particularity as he afterward conducted his cam- 

83 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

paigns. Shortly before he started with his little 
cavalcade of negro servants on his five-hundred- 
mile ride to Massachusetts, in 1756, he sent over 
to a correspondent in London an order for an ex- 
tensive wardrobe. He wanted " 2 complete livery- 
suits for servants, with a spare cloak and all other 
necessary trimmings for two suits more." He 
omits no detail. " I would have you," he writes, 
" choose the livery by our arms ; only as the field is 
white, I think the clothes had better not be quite 
so, but nearly like the inclosed. The trimmings 
and facings of scarlet, and a scarlet waistcoat. If 
livery lace is not quite disused, I should be glad 
to have the cloaks laced. I like that fashion best, 
and two silver-laced hats for the above servants." 

In addition to this, he wishes " 1 set of horse- 
furniture with livery lace, with the Washington 
crest on the housings, etc. The cloak to be of the 
same piece and color of the clothes, 3 gold and 
scarlet sword-knots, 3 silver and blue ditto, 1 fash- 
ionable gold-laced hat." 

It is not strange that the gallant young officer 
made a sensation among the dames and damsels 
of Philadelphia and New York as he journeyed 
northward, nor that Mistress Mary Phillipse nearly 
lost her heart to the wearer of the gold and scarlet 
sword-knots and the fashionable gold-laced hat. 

All society went in gorgeous array in those gay 
84 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

days, before color had been banished to suit the 
grim taste of the Puritan, and to meet the econom- 
ical maxims of Poor Richard. Judges, on the bench, 
wore robes of scarlet, faced with black velvet, ex- 
changed in summer for thinner ones of silk. Eti- 
quette demanded equally formal costume for ad- 
vocates at the bar. Patrick Henry, who began by 
indifference to dress, even rushing into court fresh 
from the chase, with mud and mire clinging to his 
leather breeches, at length yielded to social pres- 
sure, and donned a full suit of black velvet in 
which to address the court ; and, on one occasion 
at least, a peach-colored coat effectively set off by 
a bag-wig, powdered, as pompous Mr. Wirt ob- 
serves, "in the highest style of forensic fashion." 

A satirical description sets forth the dress of a 
dandy in the middle of the eighteenth century, as 
consisting of " a coat of light green, with sleeves 
too small for the arms, and buttons too big for the 
sleeves ; a pair of Manchester fine stuff breeches, 
without money in the pockets; clouded silk stock- 
ings, but no legs; a club of hair behind, larger 
than the head that carries it ; a hat of the size of 
a sixpence, on a block not worth a farthing. " 

In October, 1763, the free-school at Annapolis 
was broken into by robbers, and the wardrobe of 
the master stolen. When I remember the scanty 
salaries paid to these schoolmasters, I look with 

85 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

surprise on the inventory, which the victim of the 
robbery publishes. Here we have a superfine 
blue broadcloth frock coat, a new superfine scarlet 
waistcoat bound with gold lace, a pair of green 
worsted breeches lined with dimity, besides a 
ruffled shirt, pumps, and doe-skin breeches. A 
very pretty wardrobe, I should say, for the teacher 
of a Colonial village -school! 

It was a picturesque world in those days. The 
gentry rode gayly habited in bright-colored velvets 
and ruffles; the clergy swept along in dignified 
black; the judges wore their scarlet robes, and the 
mechanics and laborers were quite content to don 
a leather apron over their buckskin breeches and 
red-flannel jacket. The slaves in Carolina were 
forbidden to wear anything, except when in livery, 
finer than negro-cloth, duffils, kerseys, osnaburgs, 
blue linen, check-linen, coarse garlix or calicoes, 
checked cotton, or Scotch plaid. This prohibition 
was quite unnecessary, as the slave thought him- 
self very lucky if he were clad in a new and whole 
garment of any sort. 

Even paupers had their distinctive badges. A 
Virginia statute commands that every person who 
shall receive relief from the parish, and be sent to 
the poorhouse, shall, upon the shoulder of the 
right sleeve of his, or her, uppermost garment, in 
an open and visible manner, wear a badge with 

86 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

the name of the parish to which he, or she, belongs, 
cut either in blue, red, or green cloth, at the will 
of the vestry or churchwardens. If any unfor- 
tunate were afflicted with pride as well as pov- 
erty and refused to wear this badge of pauper- 
ism, he was subject, by the law, to a whipping, not 
to exceed five lashes. 

The students of William and Mary College were 
required to wear academical dress as soon as they 
had passed " y e grammar school," and thus another 
costume was added to the moving tableaux on the 
street of Williamsburg. 

In the college-books, I find it resolved by the 
Faculty in 1765 that Mrs. Foster be appointed 
stocking-mender in the college, and that she be 
paid annually the sum oi £12, provided she fur- 
nishes herself with lodging, diet, fire, and candles. 
Considering the length of stockings in those days, 
and assuming that the nature of boys has not 
materially changed, I cannot help thinking the 
salary somewhat meagre for the duties involved. 
Stockings, however, were less troublesome than 
shirts. A Mrs. Campbell sends her nephews back to 
school accompanied by a note explaining that she 
returns all their clothes except eleven shirts, not yet 
washed. 

If the clothes of boys were troublesome, those of 
girls were more so. Madam Mason, as guardian 

87 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

of her children, sends in an account, wherein the 
support of each child is reckoned at a thousand 
pounds of tobacco yearly. Her son, Thomson, is 
charged with linen and ruffled shirts, and her 
daughter, Mary, with wooden-heeled shoes, petti- 
coats, one hoop-petticoat, and linen. We may be 
sure that the needling on those petticoats and 
ruffled skirts would be a reproach, in its dainty 
fineness, to the machine-made garments of our age. 

Little Dolly Payne, who afterward became Mrs. 
Madison and mistress of the White House, trotted 
off to school in her childhood (so her biographer 
tells us), equipped with "a white linen mask to 
keep every ray of sunshine from the complexion, 
a sun-bonnet sewed on her head every morning by 
her careful mother, and long gloves covering the 
hands and arms." 

Gentlewomen, big and little, in y e olden time, 
seem to have had an inordinate fear of the sunshine, 
as is evidenced by their long gloves, their veils, 
and those riding-masks of cloth or velvet, which 
must .have been most uncomfortable to keep in 
place, even with the aid of the little silver mouth- 
pieces held between the teeth. But vanity enables 
people to endure many ills. In a correspondence 
between Miss Anna Bland in Virginia, and her 
brother Theodorick in London, the young lady 
writes : " My Papa has sent for me a dress and a 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

pair of stays. I should be glad if you will be 
peticular (sic) in the choice of them. Let the stays 
be very stiff bone, and much gored at the hips, 
and the dress any other color except yellow." 

No doubt, the consciousness of looking well, sus- 
tained the young martyr, as she gasped through 
the minuet, in her new dress and her stiff stays, 
drawn tight at home by the aid of the bed-post. 
The first directions .to the attendant in a case of 
swooning, so common in our great-grandmothers' 
lifetime, was to cut the stays, that the imprisoned 
lungs might get room to breathe once more. 

Human nature is oddly inconsistent. These 
people, who found it incomprehensible that sava- 
ges should tattoo their bodies, hang beads round 
their necks, and wear ornaments of snakes and rats 
hung by the tails through their ears and noses, 
decked themselves with jewelry, wore wigs and 
patches, and pierced their ears for barbaric rings of 
gold or precious stones. I protest I don't know 
which would have looked queerer to the other, the 
Indian squaw or the Colonial belle of the eighteenth 
century; but, from the artistic standpoint, the ad- 
vantage was all with the child of nature. 

In a grave business letter, written to Washing- 
ton on matters of state by George Mason, the 
correspondent adds: "P.S. I shall take it as a 
particular favor if you'll be kind enough to get me 

89 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

two pairs of gold snaps made at Williamsburg, for 
my little girls. They are small rings with a joint 
in them, to wear in the ears, instead of ear-rings — 
also a pair of toupee tongs." 

It is a pleasant glimpse we thus gain of one 
great statesman writing to another, and turning 
away from public enterprises to remember the 
private longings of the two little maidens at home, 
whose hearts are to be gladdened, though the flesh 
suffers, by these bits of finery. 

It was not little girls alone who were willing 
to endure discomfort in the cause of personal ap- 
pearance. Washington's false teeth still remain, a 
monument of his fortitude. They are a set of 
"uppers and unders" carved in ivory, inserted in a 
ponderous plate, with clamps in the roof that must 
have caused torture to the inexperienced mouth. 
The upper set is connected with the lower by a 
spiral spring, and the two are arranged to be held 
in place by the tongue. No one but the hero of 
Trenton and Valley Forge, could have borne such 
an affliction and preserved his equanimity. 

Tooth-brushes are a modern luxury. In the old 
times, the most genteel were content to rub the 
teeth with a rag covered with chalk or snuff, and 
there was more than a suspicion of effeminacy in 
a man's cleaning his teeth at all. It is not strange 
that there was such a demand for the implanted 

90 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

teeth which Dr. Le Mayeur introduced toward the 
end of the century. 

I think it may be fairly claimed that the nine- 
teenth century has marked a great advance in per- 
sonal cleanliness. To this, as much as anything, 
except perhaps the use of rubber clothing, we owe 
its increase of longevity. It is impossible to over- 
estimate the importance to modern hygiene of 
water-proof substances, keeping the feet and body 
dry. Pattens and clogs were of service in their 
day and generation, but they were a clumsy con- 
trivance as compared with the light overshoes of 
India-rubber. It was not till 1772 that the first 
efforts were made in Baltimore to introduce the 
use of umbrellas. "These, like tooth-brushes," 
writes Scharf, "were at first ridiculed as effemin- 
ate, and were only introduced by the vigorous efforts 
of the doctors, who recommended them chiefly 
as shields from the sun and a defence against ver- 
tigo and prostration from heat. The first um- 
brellas came from India. They were made of 
coarse oiled linen, stretched over sticks of rattan, 
and were heavy and clumsy, but they marked a 
wonderful step in the direction of hygienic dress. 
Before their introduction, ministers and doctors, 
who, more than any one else in the community, 
were called to face the winter rains, wore a cape of 
oiled linen, called a roquelaire. " 

91 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

If the dress of the period before the Revolution 
was not hygienic, it was handsome, and eminently- 
picturesque, as the old portraits of the last century 
show. The universally becoming ruffles of lace 
were in vogue, and women still young wore dainty 
caps, whose delicate lace, falling over the hair, lent 
softness and youth to the features. Old ladies were 
not unknown as now, but, at an age when the nine- 
teenth century woman of fashion is still frisking 
about in the costume of a girl of twenty, the Colo- 
nial dame adopted the dress and manners which 
she conceived suited to her age and dignity. Here, 
foi? instance, is the evidence of a portrait, marked 
on the stretcher, "Amy Newton, aged 45, 1770, 
John Durand, pinxit. " The lady wears an ermine- 
trimmed cloak draped about her shoulders, over a 
bodice, lace-trimmed and cut square in the neck. 
The lace-bordered cap falls as usual over the ma- 
tron's hair. There is, tome, something rather fine 
and dignified in the assumption of a matronly dress 
as a matter of pride and choice. In one respect 
the Colonial dames, old and young, were gayly at- 
tired. Their feet were clad in rainbow hues of 
brilliant reds and greens and their dresses were 
generally cut to show to advantage the high-heeled 
slipper and clocked stocking of bright color. 

Washington's order-book forms an excellent 
guide to the prevailing modes of the day. The 

92 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

orders call for rich coats and waistcoats and cocked 
hats for himself; and for Mrs. Washington, a sal- 
mon tabby velvet, fine flowered lawn aprons, white 
callimancos hoes, perfumed powder, puckered pet- 
ticoats, and black velvet riding masks. Master 
Custis is fitted out with two hair bags and a whole 
piece of ribbon, while the servants are provided 
with fifty ells of osnabergs (a coarse cloth made of 
flax and tow manufactured at Osnaberg, in Ger- 
many, and much in vogue for servants' wear). 

The goods of the time, for high and low, were 
made to outlast more than one generation. Charles 
Carroll, of Carrollton, was betrothed in his youth 
to a beautiful young lady. The wedding-dress 
was ordered from London, but before its arrival 
the bride elect had died, and the dress was laid 
aside. A century later, it appeared at a fancy 
dress ball, its fabric untarnished, and untouched 
by time. It was worth while to pay high prices 
for such stuffs. In many a household to-day is 
cherished some bit of the brocades, sarcenets, 
shalloons, and tammies worn by our great-grand- 
mothers and their mothers. 

In the Maryland Gazette, somewhere in the mid- 
dle of the last century, Catherine Rathel, milliner, 
from London, advertises a tempting assortment of 
white satin, India and other chintzes, calico, 
gingham, cloaks, cardinal's hats, flowered gauze 

93 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

aprons, bonnets, caps, egrettes, fillets, breast- 
flowers, fashionable ribbands, buttons and loops, 
silk hose, superfine white India stockings, box and 
ivory combs. 

The firm of Rivington & Brown present an 
equally attractive display for gentlemen : " An im- 
portation of hats, gold and silver-laced, and cocked 
by his Majesty's Hatter. London-made pumps and 
boot-garters, silk or buff sword-belts and gorgets, 
newest style paste shoe-buckles, gold seals, snuff- 
boxes of tortoise-shell, leather, or papier-mache." 

Whatever luxuries or elegances of the toilet a 
man of fashion might possess, his snuff-box was 
his chief pride. This was the weapon with which 
he fought the bloodless battles of the drawing- 
room and, armed with it, he felt himself a Cavalier 
indeed. The nice study of the times and seasons 
when it should be tapped, when played with, when 
offered or accepted, and when haughtily thrust 
into the pocket, marked the gentleman of the old 
school. But one use of the snuff-box, I am certain, 
was never devised by either Steele or Lilie, but 
was left for the brain or nerves of a Colonial dame 
to invent. A widow, left alone and unprotected, 
occupied that ground-floor room generally desig- 
nated in the Colonial house as the parlor-chamber. 
Fearing firearms more than robbers, she armed 
herself with a large snuff-box, which, in case of any 

94 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

suspicious noise in the night, she was wont to click 
loudly, in imitation of the cocking of a gun. The 
effect on the hypothetical robbers was instantane- 
ous, and they never disturbed her twice in the same 
night. 

Colonial dress, as we advance toward the time 
of the Revolution, grows simpler. Wigs fall by 
their own weight, and men begin to wear their 
own hair, drawn back and fastened in dignified 
fashion with a bow of broad ribbon, generally 
black. Except for ruffled shirts and deep cuffs, 
the costume of society approaches the sobriety of 
to-day, and the lack of money and threat of war 
subdue the dress even of the women. The mili- 
tary alone still keep up the pomp and circum- 
stance of costume worn by all men in the Stuart 
era. In 1774, the Fairfax Independent Company 
of Volunteers meet in Virginia, and resolve ta 
gather at stated seasons for practice of military 
exercise and discipline. It is further resolved 
that their dress shall be a uniform of blue turned 
up with buff, with plain yellow metal buttons, buff 
waistcoat, and breeches, and white stockings; and 
furnished with good flint-lock and bayonet, sling 
cartouch box and tomahawk. 

Washington's orders from Fort Cumberland, 
dated the seventeenth of September, 1775, pre- 
scribe the uniform to be worn by the Virginia 

95 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

Regiment in the opening struggle: " Every officer 
of the Virginia Regiment to provide himself, as 
soon as he can conveniently, with suit of Regiment- 
als of good blue Cloath ; the Coat to be faced and 
cuffed with scarlet, and trimmed with Silver; a 
scarlet waistcoat, with silver Lace; blue Breeches, 
and a silver-laced hat, if to be had, for Camp or 
Garrison duty. Besides this, each officer to pro- 
vide himself with a common soldier's Dress for 
Detachments and Duty in the Woods." 

In looking back to the beginning of the Revo- 
lutionary War, when that great wrench was made 
which separated America from the parent country, 
we have a feeling that men's minds were wholly 
occupied with the tremendous issues at stake; yet, 
as we study the old records, we find the same buy- 
ing and selling, the planting and reaping, the 
same pondering and planning of dress and the 
trifles of daily life going on much in the old fashion. 
In Jefferson's private note-book, under date of July 
4th, 1776, the day of the signing of the Declara- 
tion of Independence, I find, entered in his own 
hand, the item: "For seven pairs of women's 
gloves, twenty shillings." 

Even so do great things and small jostle one an- 
other in this strange world of ours, and a woman's 
glove lies close to the document which changed 
the fate of nations. 

96 



News, Trade and Travel 




News , T rade, anj^TravgU 

Printed by M r .Har ru Q^-^ 
^^r,,, JT ^ Ng 1. W i IK*-- 

IN the early days, the high- 
ways of the Cavalier Colo- 
nies were the broad waters of 
bay and sound ; their by-ways, 
the innumerable rivers and 
creeks; and their toll-gates, the ports of entry. 
Road-making was tedious and costly, and the set- 
tlers saw no reason for wasting time and energy 
in the undertaking, when nature had spread her 
pathways at their feet, and they needed only to 
step into a canoe, or a skiff manned by black 
oarsmen, to glide from one plantation to another; 
or to hoist sail in a pinnace for distant settlements. 
Many animals travel, but man is the only one who 
packs a trunk, and, except a few like the nautilus 
and the squirrel, the only one who sails a boat. 
There is a sentiment connected with a ship, which 
no other conveyance can ever have. The very 
names of those old colonial vessels are redolent 
of " amber-greece, " " pearle," and treasure, of East 
India spices and seaweed 

"From Bermuda's reefs, and edges 
Of sunken ledges 
In some far-off bright Azore." 

99 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

The history of the colonies might be written in 
the story of their ships. There were The Good 
Speed, The Discovery, and The Susan Constant, which 
preceded the world-famous Half Moon and May- 
flower to the new world. There were The Ark 
and The Dove that brought over Lord Baltimore and 
his colonists; The Sea- Venture which went to wreck 
on the Somer Isles; and The Patience, and The 
Deliverance which brought her crew safe to Virginia. 
These were the pioneers, followed by a long line 
of staunch craft, large and small, from the Golden 
Lyon to The Peggy Stewart, which discharged her 
cargo of taxed tea into Chesapeake Bay. 

Many ships in those days were named, as we 
name chrysanthemums, in honor of some promi- 
nent man or fair dame. These good folk must 
have followed the coming and going of their 
namesakes with curious interest. The sight of 
a sail on the horizon never lost its excite- 
ment, for every ship brought some wild tale 
of adventure. The story of shipwreck "on the 
still vexed Bermoothes," and the wonderful es- 
cape of Gates and Somers, with their crew, has 
been made famous forever by the tradition that it 
suggested to Shakespeare the plot of The Tempest; 
but every " frygat" that touched at Jamestown or 
Annapolis brought accounts almost as thrilling, of 
storm and stress, of fighting tempests with a crew 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

reduced by scurvy to three or four active seamen, 
of running for days from a Spanish caravel or 
a French pickaroune. 

The Margaret and John set sail for America early 
in the seventeenth century, carrying eighty pas- 
sengers, besides sailors, and armed with " eight 
Iron peeces and a Falcon." When she reached 
the " He of Domenica," the captain entered a har- 
bor, that the men might stretch their limbs on dry 
land, " having been eleven weeks pestered in this 
vnwholesome ship." Here, to their misfortune, 
they found two large ships flying Hollander 
colors, but proving to be Spaniards. These ene- 
mies sent a volley of shot which split the oars and 
made holes in the boats, yet failed to strike a man 
on the Margaret and John. 

"Perceiving what they were," writes one of the 
English crew, " we. fitted ourselves the best we 
could to prevent a mischief: seeing them warp 
themselves to windward, we thought it not good 
to be boarded on both sides at an anchor ; we in- 
tended to set saile, but the Vice-Admiral battered 
so hard at our starboard side, that we fell to our 
businesse, and answered their vnkindnesse with 
such faire shot from a demiculvering, that shot her 
betweene wind and water, whereby she was glad 
to leave us and her Admirall together." The Ad- 
miral then bespoke them, and demanded a sur- 

IOI 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

render; to which the sturdy English replied that 
they had no quarrel with the King of Spain, 
and asked only to go their way unmolested, but as 
they would do no wrong, assuredly they would 
take none. The Spaniards answered these bold 
words with another volley of shot, returned with 
energy by the English guns. 

" The fight continued halfe an houre, as if we 
had been invironed with fire and smoke, untill they 
discovered the waste of our ship naked, where they 
bravely boorded us, loofe for loofe, hasting with 
pikes and swords to enter; but it pleased God so 
to direct our Captaine and encourage our men with 
valour, that our pikes being formerly placed under 
our halfe deck, and certaine shot lying close for 
that purpose under the port holes, encountered 
them so rudely, that their fury was not onety re- 
bated, but their hastinesse intercepted, and their 
whole company beaten backe ; many of our men 
were hurt, but I am sure they had two for one." 
Thus, all day and all night, the unequal battle con- 
tinued, till at length the doughty little British 
vessel fairly fought off her two enemies, and they 
fell sullenly back and ran near shore to mend their 
leaks, while the Margaret and John stood on her 
course. 

It is hard, in these days, when the high seas are 
as safe as city streets, to realize the condition of 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

terror to which merchantmen were reduced, two 
hundred years ago, by the rumor of a black flag 
seen in the offing, or of some " pyrat" lying in wait 
outside the harbor. In Governor Spotswood's time, 
Williamsburg was thrown into a state of great ex- 
citement by the report that the dreaded buccaneer 
John Theach, known by the name of Blackbeard, 
had been seen cruising along the coasts of Virginia 
and Carolina. The Governor rose to the occasion, 
however. He sent out Lieutenant Maynard with 
two ships, to look for Blackbeard. Maynard found 
him and boarded his vessel in Pamlico Sound. The 
pirate was no coward. He ordered one of his men 
to stand beside the powder-magazine with a lighted 
match, ready, at a signal from him, to blow up 
friends and foes together. The signal never came, 
for a lucky shot killed Blackbeard on the spot and 
his crew surrendered. They might as well have 
died with their leader, for thirteen of them were 
hanged at Williamsburg. Blackbeard's skull was 
rimmed with silver and made into a ghastly drink- 
ing-cup, and we hear no more of pirates in those 
waters. 

The protection of vessels was not the only rea- 
son for policing the waterways. Smuggling was 
much more common than piracy, and the laws 
against it were the harder to enforce, because the 
entire community was secretly in sympathy with 

103 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

the offenders. In the earliest Maryland records is 
Lord Baltimore's commission, giving his lieuten- 
ant authority to " appoint fit places for public ports 
for lading, shipping, unlading and discharging all 
goods and merchandizes to be imported or exported 
into or out of our said province, and to prohibit 
the shipping or discharging of any goods or mer- 
chandizes whatsoever in all other places." Any 
one violating the shipping law was subject to 
heavy fines and imprisonment. 

In Virginia the statutes compelled ships to stop 
at Jamestown, or other designated ports, before 
breaking bulk at the private landings along the 
river. Who can picture the excitement in those 
lonely plantations when the frigate tied up at the 
wharf, and began to unload from its hold, its cargo 
of tools for the farm, furniture for the house, 
and, best of all, the square white letters with big 
round seals, containing news of the friends distant 
a three months' journey! Sometimes the new 
comer would prove no ocean voyager, but a nearer 
neighbor, some stout, round-sterned packet, from 
New Netherland or New England, laden with grain 
and rum, or hides and rum, to be exchanged for 
the tobacco of the Old Dominion. 

To journey from one colony to another thus, the 
trader must first secure a license and take oath that 
he would not sell or give arms or ammunition to 
104 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

the Indians. On these terms Lord Baltimore, 
* n l6 37, granted to a merchant mariner, liberty 
11 to trade and commerce for corn, beaver or any 
other commodities with the Dutchmen on Hudson 's 
river, or with any Indians or other people whatso- 
ever being- or inhabiting to the northward, with- 
out the capes commonly called Cape Henry and 
Cape Charles." 

Long after the waters of Chesapeake Bay were 
dotted with sails, and the creeks of Maryland and 
Virginia gay with skiffs, the land communication 
was still in an exceedingly primitive condition. 
The roads were little more than bridle-paths. 
The surveyors deemed their duty done if the logs 
and fallen trees were cleared away, and all Vir- 
ginia could not boast of a single engineer. Bridges 
there were none; and the traveller, arriving 
at a river bank, must find a ford, or swim his 
horse across, counting himself fortunate if he 
kept his pouch of tobacco dry. Planters at 
a distance from the rivers hewed out rolling- 
roads, on which they brought down their tobacco 
in casks, attached to the horses that drew them 
by hoop-pole shafts. Roads, winding along the 
streams, were slowly laid out, and answered well 
enough in fair weather, but in storms they were 
impassable, and at night so bewildering that be- 
lated travellers were forced to come to a halt, make 
105 



/ 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

a fire, and bivouac till morning. In 1704, the 
roads in Maryland were so poor that we find the 
Assembly passing an act declaring that " the roads 
leading to any county court-house shall have two 
notches on the trees on both sides of the roads, 
and another notch a distance above the other two ; 
and any road that leads to any church shall be 
marked, into the entrance of the same, and at the 
leaving any other road, with a slip cut down the 
face of the tree near the ground." Guide-posts 
were still unknown. 

The travel was as primitive as the roads. Pub- 
lic coaches did not exist. Horseback riding was 
the usual way of getting over the ground, though 
the rough roads made the jolting a torment. 
"Travelling in this country," wrote a stranger, 
as late as the Revolution, " is extremely dan- 
gerous, especially if it is the least windy, from 
the number of rotten pines continually blowing 
down. " It was no uncommon thing for a driver 
to be obliged to turn into the woods half a dozen 
times in a single mile to avoid the fallen logs. 
A certain Madame de Reidefel, who was driv- 
ing in a post-chaise with her children, had a 
narrow escape from death. A rotten tree fell 
directly across her path, but fortunate^ struck 
between the chaise and the horses, so that the 
occupants of the carriage escaped, though the 
106 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

front wheels were crushed, and one of the horses 
lamed. 

Between pirates on sea and pine-trees on land, so 
many perils beset the traveller that starting on a 
journey became a momentous undertaking. " It 
was no uncommon thing," writes the historian, 
" for one who went on business or pleasure from 
Charleston to Boston or New York, if he were a 
prudent and cautious man, to consult the almanac 
before setting out, to make his will, to give a din- 
ner or a supper to his friends at the tavern, and 
there to bid them a formal goodbye." 

A journey being so great an affair, the traveller 
was of course a marked man, and his arrival at an 
ordinary was the signal for the gathering of all 
who could crowd in to hear of his adventures, and 
also to hear the public and private news of which 
he might be the bearer. " I have heard Dr. 
Franklin relate with great pleasantry," said one 
of his friends, " that in travelling when he was 
young, the first step he took for his tranquillity 
and to obtain immediate attention at the inns, was 
to anticipate inquiry, by saying: 'My name is 
Benjamin Franklin. I was born at Boston, am a 
printer by profession, am travelling to Philadel- 
phia, shall have to return at such a time, and have 
no news. Now what can you give me for dinner?' " 

This curiosity was rather peculiar to New Eng- 
109 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

land. The Southerner, while perhaps as anxious 
to hear the news, was more restrained in asking 
questions. That good breeding and tact which 
were a Cavalier inheritance, taught him to wait 
decorously for his news as for his food. A for- 
eigner in the last century, in travelling through 
the South, came upon a party of Virginians smok- 
ing and drinking together on a veranda. He re- 
ports that on his ascending the steps to the piazza, 
every countenance seemed to say, 'This man has a 
double claim to our attention, for he is a stranger 
in the place!' In a moment, there was room made 
for him to sit down ; a new bowl was called for, and 
every one who addressed him did it with a smile 
of conciliation; but no man asked him whence he 
had come or whither he was going." 

All foreigners bear the same testimony to this 
universal courtesy, which smoothed rough roads 
and made travelling enjoyable, in spite of its diffi- 
culties and dangers. When I realize what those 
difficulties were, I am surprised at the willing- 
ness with which journeys were undertaken. I 
read of Washington setting out on a mission to 
Major-General Shirley in Boston, and riding the 
whole distance of five hundred miles on horseback 
in the depth of winter, escorted only by a few 
servants; yet little is made of his experiences. 
Women, too, were quite accustomed to riding 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

on long expeditions. An octogenarian described 
to Irving the horseback journeys of his mother 
in her scarlet cloth riding-habit. " Young ladies 
from the country," he said, "used to come to the 
balls at Annapolis, riding, with their hoops ar- 
ranged fore and aft like lateen sails; and after 
dancing all night, would ride home again in the 
morning. " 

Annapolis, before the Revolution, was a centre 
of gayety. Its rich families came up to town for 
the season each Fall, and in the Spring moved 
back to their country-houses with their various 
belongings. The family coach which was used to 
transport these possessions was a curious affair to 
modern eyes. It was colored generally a light 
yellow, with smart facings. The body was of 
mahogany, with Venetian windows on each side, 
projecting lamps, and a high seat upon which 
coachman and footman climbed at starting. 

As this old coach lumbered up and down the 
streets of Annapolis, its occupants no doubt fan- 
cied that they had reached the final limit of speed 
and comfort in travel, and they looked back with 
scorn and pit} 7 on the primitive conveyances of 
their ancestors, just as posterity will doubtless look 
back from their balloons and electric motors on our 
steam engines. In one of Jefferson's early letters 
we chance upon a curious prophecy. Being about 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

to make a visit, he asks to be met by his friend's 
" periagua, " as a canoe was called, and suggests that 
some day a boat may be made, which shall row 
itself. 

After all, I question whether there was not more 
pleasure in travel in those days, before boats rowed 
themselves, and when horses were made of flesh 
and blood instead of iron and steam; when the 
rider ambled along, noting each tree and shrub, 
pausing to exchange greetings with every way- 
farer, and stopping by night beneath some hos- 
pitable roof to make merry over the cup of sack 
or the glass of "quince drink" prepared for his 
refreshment. If the traveller was of a surly and un- 
social nature, he was indeed to be pitied ; since, for 
him who would not accept his neighbor's hospital- 
ity, there remained only the roadside tavern or " or- 
dinary, " and woe to him who was compelled to test 
its welcome! The universal practice of keeping 
open-house made the inns poorer in quality, and 
the contempt of the community for one who would 
receive money for the entertainment of guests, 
kept men of repute out of the business. 

A Maryland statute, in 1674, resolves "that noe 
Person in that Province shall have a Licence to 
keep Ordinary for the future but th* he shall give 
Bond to his Excellency with good Sureties that he 
shall keep foure good ffeather beds for the Enter- 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

tainment of Customers." In any place where the 
county court is held, he is directed to keep " eight 
fleather or fflock beds at the least, and ffurniture 
suitable." The charges of the ordinary -keeper 
are fixed by law. He is allowed to charge ten 
pounds of tobacco per meal "for dyet," ten pounds 
"for small beare," and four "for lodging in a bed 
with sheets. " 

While the traveller was loitering on the road, 
enjoying hospitality or enduring ordinaries, those 
he left at home were in ignorance of his where- 
abouts; and it was only after days or weeks of 
anxious waiting, that they could hope to hear of 
his safe arrival at his destination. Meanwhile 
rumor, which always thrives in proportion to 
ignorance, might make their lives miserable by 
reports of a riderless horse seen galloping into 
some village, of storms and gales, or of trees crash- 
ing across the lonely roads. In the absence of the 
post and the telegraph, this spreading of false 
news became so troublesome that an act was 
passed in Maryland declaring that," Whereas many 
Idle and Bussie-headed people doe forge and di- 
vulge falce Rumors and Reports," it is enacted 
that they be either fined or "receive such cor- 
porall punishment, not extending to life or mem- 
ber, as to the Iustices of that court shall seeme 
meete." 

"3 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

It was long before the idea of a postal service 
under government control dawned upon the Col- 
onies. Throughout almost the whole of the sev- 
enteenth century letters were sent by the hand of 
the chance traveller. Maryland directed that in 
the case of public state-papers the sheriff of one 
county should carry them to the sheriff of the 
next, and so on to their goal; but private letters 
had no such official care. 

An old Virginia statute commanded that " all 
letters superscribed/^/- thepublique service, should be 
immediately conveyed from plantation to planta- 
tion to the place and person directed, under the 
penalty of one hogshead of tobacco for each de- 
fault." 

Another law, bearing date 1661, orders that 
"when there is any person in the family where 
the letters come, as can write, such person is re- 
quired to endorse the day and houre he received 
them, that the neglect or contempt of any person 
stopping them may be the better knowne and pun- 
ished accordingly." 

A letter in those days merited the attention it 
received, for it represented a vast deal of labor 
and expense. Paper was a costly luxury, as we 
may infer from those old yellow pages crossed and 
re-crossed with writing, and the tiny cramped hand 
in which the old sermons are written. In 1680, I 
114 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

find Colonel William Fitzhugh ordering from Lon- 
don " two large Paper-Books, one to contain about 
fourteen or fifteen quires of paper, the other about 
ten quires, and one other small one." 

The paper was left blank on one side, and so 
folded that it formed its own envelope. It was 
fastened with a seal whose taste and elegance was 
a matter of pride with the writer. The style was 
formal, as became the dignity of a person who 
knew how to write. In those times people did not 
write letters ; they indited epistles. A communi- 
cation sent across the ocean, in 1614, is addressed 
" To y e Truly Honorable & Right Worthy Knight, 
S r Thomas Smith," and is signed: "At Y r Com- 
mand To Be Disposed of." 

Love-letters shared the formality of the time, 
and were written with a stateliness and elaboration 
of compliment which suggest a minuet on paper. 
Family letters are often in the form of a journal, 
and cover a period of months. They cost both 
labor and money but they were worth their price. 
Cheap postage has made cheap writing. We no 
longer compose; we only scribble. 

In 1693, Thomas Neale was appointed by royal 
patent, "postmaster-general of Virginia and all 
other parts of North America." The House of Bur- 
gesses passed an Act declaring that if post-offices 
were established in every county, Neale should 

115 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER 



receive threepence for every letter not exceeding 
one sheet, or to or from any place not exceeding 
four score English miles distance. 

In 1706, letters were forwarded eight times a 
year from Philadelphia to the Potomac, and after- 
ward as far as Williamsburg, with the proviso that 

the post - rider should 
not start for Philadel- 
phia till he had received 
enough letters to pay the 
expenses of the trip. 

The average day's 
journey for a postman 
covered a distance of 
some forty miles in 
Summer, and over good 
roads; but, when the 
heavy Autumn rains- 
washed out great gullies 
in his path or the Winter 
storms beat him back, he was lucky if he accom- 
plished half that distance. His letters were sub- 
ject to so many accidents, that it is a wonder 
they ever reached the persons to whom they were 
addressed. It was not till the post-office passed 
into Franklin's energetic and methodical hands 
that it was made regular and trustworthy. 

The estimate of the common post in early days 
116 




THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

is curiously illustrated by an episode which oc- 
curred in Virginia. The hero was one Mr. Daniel 
Park, "who," says the chronicle, "to all the other 
accomplishments that make a complete sparkish 
gentleman, has added one upon which he infinitely 
values himself; that is, a quick resentment of 
every, the least thing, that looks like an affront or 
injury. " 

One September morning, when the Governor of 
Maryland was breakfasting with Mr. Commissary 
Blair at Middle Plantation, Colonel Park marched 
in upon them, having a sword about him, much 
longer than what he commonly travelled with, 
and which he had caused to be ground sharp in 
the point that morning. Addressing himself to 
the Governor of Maryland, he burst out: "Cap- 
tain Nicholson, did you receive a letter that I sent 
you from New York?" 

"Yes," answered Nicholson, " I received it." 

"And was it done like a gentleman," fumed the 
fiery colonel, " to send that letter by the hand of 
a common post, to be read by everybody in Vir- 
ginia? I look upon it as an affront, and expect 
satisfaction!" 

Fancy the number of affairs of honor that this 
" complete young sparkish gentleman " would have 
on hand if he lived in the present year of grace and 
resented every letter sent him by the common post ! 

117 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

There is something which strikes us as infinitely 
diverting in his suggestion that everybody in Vir- 
ginia would be interested in his letter. But per- 
haps he was nearer the truth than we realize, for 
in his day all news came through such sources, 
and a letter was regarded as a good thing, which 
it would be gross selfishness not to share with 
one's neighbors. As for a letter from Europe it 
was an affair of the greatest magnitude, exciting 
the interest of the whole community. 

Those giant folios which entertain us every 
morning with their gossip from all quarters of the 
globe had no existence then. Early in the last 
century, the Colonial Cavalier gleaned all his 
knowledge of the world and its affairs, from some 
three-month-old copy of the London papers and 
magazines, brought over by a British packet. 
Even this communication, it seems, was uncertain, 
for complaint is made that the masters of vessels 
keep the packages till an accidental conveyance 
offers, and for want of better opportunities fre- 
quently commit them to boatmen, who care very 
little for their goods, so they get their freight. 

The colonists had struggled to establish a local 
journal, and a printing press had been started in 
Virginia in the seventeenth century, but it had been 
strangled in its infancy by Berkeley, who declared 
it the parent of treason and infidelity; and so it 
118 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

came about that the Southern Provinces had no 
public utterance for their news or their views, till 
the silence was broken by the voice of Maryland, 
speaking - through her Gazette, in 1727, when in all 
America there were only six rival sheets. Frank- 
lin says that his brother's friends tried to dissuade 
him from publishing The New England Courant, on 
the ground that there was already one newspaper 
in America. His memory lapsed a little, as The 
Courant had in fact three predecessors, but the in- 
cident shows how little notion there was at that 
time, of the public demand for news. 

In 1736, was first issued The Virginia Gazette, a 
dingy little sheet about twelve by six inches in 
size, and costing to subscribers, fifteen shillings a 
year. The newspaper of the day had no editorial 
page. Its comments on public affairs were in the 
form of letters, after the fashion of The Tatler and 
The Spectator. It had a poet's corner, where many 
a young versemaker tried the wings of his Pegasus, 
and it printed also poetical tributes under the no- 
tices of deaths and marriages. In this section, after 
the record of the wedding of Mr. William Derri- 
coat and Miss Suckie Tomkies, appear these lines: 

" Hers the mild lustre of the blooming morn 
And his the radiance of the rising day — 
Long may they live and mutually possess 
A steady love and genuine happiness !" 
119 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

When Edmund Randolph married Betsey Nich- 
olas, the poet found himself unable to express his 
emotions in less than two stanzas: 

" Exalted theme, too high for common lays ! 
Could my weak muse with beauty be inspired, 
In numbers smooth I'd chant my Betsy's praise, 
And tell how much her Randolph is admired. 

"To light the hymeneal torch, since they're resolved, 
Kind Heaven, I trust, will make them truly blest; 
And when the Gordian knot shall be dissolved, 
Translate them to eternal peace and rest. " 

It is safe to say that this figure, comparing matri- 
mony with a Gordian knot, was original with the 
poet. Had the bridegroom been as fiery and 
" sparkish" as Colonel Park, he might have called 
out the writer, but he seems to have taken it in 
good part. 

The prospectus of the Maryland Gazette for 1745 
announces that its price will be twelve shillings a 
year, or fourteen shillings sealed and delivered. 
It promises the freshest advices, foreign and do- 
mestic, but adds, with much simplicity and can- 
dor: "In a dearth of news, which in this remote 
part of the world may sometimes reasonably be 
expected, we shall study to supply the deficit by 
presenting our readers with the best material we 
can possibly collect, having always due regard to 
120 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

the promotion of virtue and learning, the sup- 
pression of vice and immorality, and the instruc- 
tion as well as entertainment of our readers." 
What more could the most exacting subscriber 
demand? 

Advertisements, then, as now, served the double 
purpose of filling space, and supporting the paper. 
They were charged for, at the rate of five shillings 
for the first week, and one shilling for each week 
following, provided they were of moderate length 
— a vague provision, one would say. These old 
advertisements are of great value to the student 
of the life of the past. They give a better picture 
of the condition of society, than a ream of " notes. " 
Here we read of the shipping of a crew on a 
packet bound for England. Half-way down the 
column a lost hog is advertised, and here, Edward 
Morris, breeches-maker, announces a sale of buck- 
skin breeches, and gloves with high tops, and as- 
sures his customers that " they may depend on kind 
usage at reasonable rates." Surely the resources 
of modern advertising have never devised any- 
thing more alluring than this promise of " kind 
usage at reasonable rates." 

Since the art of reading was unknown to a con- 
siderable proportion of the community, it was natu- 
ral that pictorial devices should be largely used. 
Not only were the shops along the highways 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

distinguished by such signs as "the Blue Glove," 
and "the Golden Keys," with appropriate illus- 
trations; but in the advertising columns of the 
papers, the print was re-enforced by pictures of 
ships and horses, and runaway slaves. 

The purchase and sale of negroes formed a 
standing advertisement, beneath the caption of 
an auction-block. 

In the Virginia Gazette of August, 1767, we find 
the following under the curious headline : 

"Sale of a Musical Slave." 

" A valuable young handsome Negro fellow, 
about 18 or 20 years of age; has every qualifica- 
tion of a genteel and sensible servant, and has 
been in many different parts of the world. He 
shaves, dresses hair, and plays on the French horn. 
He lately came from London, and has with him 
two suits of new clothes, which the purchaser may 
have with him. Inquire at the printing office." 

It is hard to understand why the owner should 
wish to part with a prodigy possessed of so many 
accomplishments. Perhaps his playing on the 
French horn is the explanation. 

Runaway servants, both black and white, form 
the subject of many advertisements in those old 
newspapers. In the Maryland Gazette (1769) ap- 
122 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

pears a description in rhyme of the disappearance 
of an indented servant : 

"Last Wednesday morn at break of day, 
From Philadelphia ran away 
An Irishman, named John McKeogn. 
To fraud and imposition prone, 
About five feet five inches high ; 
Can curse and swear, as well as lie. 
How old he is I can't engage, 
But forty-five is near his age. 

" He oft in conversation chatters 
Of Scripture and religious matters, 
And fain would to the world impart 
That virtue lodges in his heart. 
But, take the rogue from stem to stern, 
The hypocrite you'll soon discern 

"And find, though his deportment's civil, 
A saint without, within a devil. 
Whoe'er secures said John McKeogn, 
(Provided I should get my own) , 
Shall have from me in cash paid down 
Five dollar bills, and half-a-crown." 

Mary Nelson is the owner and poet, or, in the 
fashion of the day, I should say poetess, and per- 
haps owneress, as I find it recorded of Mary God- 
dard that she was postmistress of Baltimore and 
Printress and Editress of the Baltimore Journal. 

The world moves. The auction-block, and the 
123 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

runaway slave, with his bundle on his back, have 
disappeared from among the pictures in the ad- 
vertising column ; the packet has given way to the 
ocean steamer; the horse to the bicycle; the stage 
coach to the railroad ; the little provincial gazettes, 
with their coarse gray paper and blurred type, to 
the great dailies, as large as the Bible and as 
doubtful as the Apocrypha. I wonder if another 
century will have such astounding tales to tell of 
progress in news, trade and travel ! 
124 



His Friends and Foes 



His Friendes 

Foes- 




HE early adventurers had 
"never seen anything of 
savage life till they touched the 
shores of Virginia. Everything 
connected with the strange beings 
there was full of interest. They set down faith- 
fully whatever they saw, and a good deal more 
besides. 

The Susquehannocks impressed them most of all 
the Indian tribes. Their enormous height and 
fine proportions made them look like giants, and 
their attire was as impressive as their persons. 
One who saw them, writes home in those first 
pioneer days: "Their attire is the skinnes of 
Beares and Woolves. Some have Cassacks made 
of Beares heads and skinnes that a mans head goes 
through the skinnes neck, and the eares of the 
Beare fastened to his shoulders, the nose and teeth 
hanging downe his breast, another Beares face 
split behind him, and at the end of the nose hung 
a Pawe. The half sleeves comming to the elbowes 
were the neckes of Beares and the armes through 

127 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

the mouth with pawes hanging- at their noses. 
One had the head of a Wolfe hanging in a chaine 
for a Iewell." 

One of their chiefs specially impressed the Eng- 
lish. He was a giant among giants. The calf of 
his leg was three-quarters of a yard round, and 
"the rest of his limbs answerable to that propor- 
tion." His arrows were five quarters long, and he 
wore a wolf's skin at his back for a quiver. 
The picture of this Indian Hercules accompanied 
the maps which Captain Smith sent home to en- 
lighten the Company in England. 

The stories of the different adventurers were 
gathered together and printed as "The General 
History of Virginia." The volume was adorned 
(I cannot say illustrated) by a series of woodcuts, 
which make us laugh aloud by their inaccuracy. 
The Indians are simply gigantic Englishmen 
naked and beardless, with the hair standing in a 
stiff ridge on top of the head, like a cock's comb. 
The wigwams look like haystacks, and the canoes 
like bathtubs. What a collection of pictures we 
might have had, if a kodak had been among the 
possessions of Captain Smith and his company! 
We should see King Pamaunche with " the chaine 
of pearles round his necke thrice double, the third 
parte of them as bygg as pease, " and catch a view 
of his " pallace" with its hundred-acre garden set 
128 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

with beans, pease, tobacco, gourdes, pompions, 
" and other thinges unknowne to us in our tongue." 
We should have the interiors of the smoky wig- 
wams which Spelman and Archer visited, the 
forms of the squaws dimly outlined against the 
grimy mat, as they pounded corn, or dropped the 
bread into the kettle to boil. 

Thanks to John Smith's graphic pen, we have 
a picture of Powhatan, that fierce old ancestor of 
so many first families of Virginia, almost as vivid as 
a photograph. Smith went to visit him, and found 
him proudly tying upon a bedstead a foot high, 
upon ten or twelve mats. " At head sat a wo- 
man, at his feet another. On each side, sitting 
upon a mat upon the ground, were ranged his chief 
men, on each side the fire, five or ten in rank, and 
behind them as many young women, each a great 
chaine of white beads over their shoulders, their 
heads painted in red, and with such a grave and 
majestical countenance as drove us into admira- 
tion to see such state in a naked savage." 

We might suppose these last words applied to 
the women, instead of to Powhatan, did we not 
know how little state and majesty were allowed 
these copper-colored Griseldas. Th e Indian squaws 
were little more than slaves. When the braves 
moved, it was the squaws who carried the wigwams 
and set them up in the new camp. When the 

129 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

men sat at meals, they spread the mats, waited 
upon their masters, and finally contented their ap- 
petites with the remnants of the feast. In the 
field, too, they bore the brunt of the toil : " Let 
squaws and hedgehogs scratch the ground," said 
an old warrior; "man was made for war and the 
chase." 

Yet, wretched and abused as these women were, 
they seemed content with their lot, and when their 
husbands died, they not only mourned for them, but 
seemed quite ready to enter the same servitude 
with a new master. " I once saw a young widow," 
said Jefferson, "whose husband, a warrior, had 
died about eight days before, hastening to finish 
her grief, and who, by tearing her hair, beating 
her breast, and drinking spirits, made the tears 
flow in great abundance in order that she might 
grieve much in a short space of time, and be mar- 
ried that evening to another young warrior." 

Spelman, a Virginia adventurer who, in the 
course of one of his exploring trips, witnessed 
an Indian wedding, has left us an account of the 
ceremony. "Ye man," he says, "goes not unto 
any place to be married, but ye woman is brought 
to him where he dwelleth. At her coming, her 
father or cheefe frend ioynes the hands togither, 
and then ye father, or cheefe frend of the man, 
bringeth a longe string of beades and, measuringe 

130 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

his armes leangth thereof, doth breake it over ye 
handes of those that ar to be married while their 
handes be ioyned together and gives it unto ye 
woman's father or him that brings hir. And so, 
with much mirth and feastinge they go togither. " 

This " longe string of beades" of which Spelman 
spoke, was probably made of the peak and roanoke, 
which made the riches of the Indian, and served 
him at once for money and ornament. Both were 
made from shell — one dark, the other white. The 
darker was the more valuable, and was distin- 
guished as wampum peak. The English traders 
accepted it as coinage, and reckoned its value at 
eighteen pence a yard, while the white peak sold 
for ninepence. In the proceedings of the Mary- 
land Council we find Thomas Cornwaleys licensed 
to trade with the Indians for corn, roanoke, and 
peak. 

When the red men wished to make bargains 
with the English, before interpreters had been 
trained to speak both languages, the counting was 
done by dropping beans, one by one, amid total 
silence. Woe to the offender who interrupted an 
Indian during this critical operation, or indeed at 
any time! An interruption was looked upon as 
an unpardonable affront. Once, in the time of 
Bacon's Rebellion, an Indian chief, accompanied 
by several of his tribe, came to negotiate a treaty 

131 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

of peace with the English. In the course of the 
Werrowance's address, one of his attendants ven- 
tured to put in a word. Instantly, the chief 
snatched a tomahawk from his girdle, split the 
poor fellow's skull, motioned to his companions to 
carry him out, and continued his speech as calmly 
as though nothing had happened. 

The lack of ceremony in the white men's ad- 
dress, and the frequency with which they inter- 
rupted, struck the Indian as amazing and unpar- 
donable. There is a tradition that one of the 
early preachers strove to teach an old Indian brave 
the doctrine of the Trinity. The Indian heard 
him calmly to the end, and then began in his turn to 
tell of the Great Spirit who spoke in the thunder, 
and whose smile was the sunshine. In the midst 
of his discourse, the clergyman broke in, " But all 
this is not true. " The Indian, turning to the circle 
around, remarked : " What sort of man is this? He 
has been talking for an hour of his three Gods, and 
now he will not let me tell of my one." 

The character of the Indian was a strange mix- 
ture of apparent contradictions. He would hunt 
and fish for a season, and then feast and make 
merry night and day while his supplies lasted. 
When they were exhausted, he would gird up his 
loins, and fast for a period long enough to end the 
life of a white man. He had an inordinate love 
132 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

of finery, upon which the English traded from the 
first. He would barter away a whole Winter's 
provisions of corn for a scarlet blanket or a bunch 
of gay-colored beads. Yet he was not without a 
natural shrewdness which enlightened him when 
he was being cheated. The story runs that some 
of the early missionaries taught the savages that 
their salvation depended on catching for them shad, 
which the) r sold to the settlers. In the course of 
time the Indians discovered the trick, and drove 
out the deceivers. Years afterward, another mis- 
sion was established, and the first priest took as 
his text, " Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to 
the waters!" The Indians gathered round the 
preacher when the sermon was ended, and one of 
the tribe said: "White man, you speak in fine 
words of the waters of life ; but before we decide 
on what we have heard, we would like to know 
whether any shad swim in those waters ! " 

It must be confessed that the Indians appear to 
better advantage than the English, in the early 
transactions. When Hamor went to visit King 
Powhatan, he was received with royal courtesy. 
The chief sent one of his attendants to bring what 
food he could find, though he explained that, as 
they were not expecting visitors, they had not kept 
anything ready. "Presently," Hamor recounts, 
" the bread was brought in two great wodden bowls, 
133 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

the quantity of a bushel sod bread, made up round, 
of the bygnesse of a tenise-ball, whereof we eat 
some few. " After this repast, Hamor and his com- 
rades were regaled with " a great glasse of sacke," 
and then were ushered into the wigwam appro- 
priated to them for the night. English and Indian 
ideas of comfort did not correspond, however, for 
Hamor complains : " We had not bin halfe an hour 
in the house, before the fleas began so to torment us 
that we could not rest there, but went forth and 
under abroadeoake, upon a mat. reposed ourselves 
that night." 

Hamor took with him on this visit, as an offer- 
ing to the Indian chief, five strings of blue and 
white beads, two pieces of copper, five wooden 
combs, ten fishhooks, and a pair of knives. In 
return for these costly presents, this pious English 
gentleman asked Powhatan, who had already given 
Pocahontas to the whites, to send them another 
daughter, really as a hostage, but nominally as a 
wife to Sir Thomas Dale, the worthy governor of 
Virginia, regardless of the slight objection that 
there was already a Lady Dale in England. Poca- 
hontas had good reason for saying to Smith when 
she met him in London, " Your countrymen will 
lie much." 

To the early settlers the savage seemed a 
strange being, not more than half human, who hap- 
134 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

pened to be in possession of the land they coveted. 
They thought they did God service when they 
flung to the Indian a Bible and a handful of beads, 
in exchange for the land which had been his birth- 
right for centuries. They cheated and cajoled 
him when he was angry, as they might have 
wheedled an angry tiger ; yet, strange to say, they 
were quite off their guard when, at length, the 
tiger made his spring, and glutted the vengeance 
he had been nursing so long. 

When the news of the Indian massacre reached 
England, it roused a frenzy of revenge equal in fury 
to that of the savages. The Virginia Company 
quite forgot that they had set forth in their charter 
that the conversion of the Indians was one of the 
main objects of the new adventure, or if they re- 
membered it at all, it was only to apologize lamely 
for a complete change of base. " We condemn their 
bodies," they wrote to the colonists, "the saving 
of whose souls we have so zealously affected. Root 
them out from being any longer a people. . . . 
War perpetually without peace or truce: yet spare 
the young for servants" (the Englishman even in 
a rage has an eye to the main chance). " Starve 
them by destroying their corn, or reaping it for 
your own use! Pluck up their weirs! Obstruct 
their hunting! Employ foreign enemies against 
them at so much a head ! Keep a band of your 

i35 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

own men continually upon them, to be paid by the 
colony, which is to have half of their captives and 
plunder!" 

These short, nervous sentences fell like hammer- 
strokes on the ears of the Englishmen in America, 
and they found an echo in their hearts. It is easy 
for us to characterize their revengeful spirit as in- 
consistent and unchristian. It is easy to tolerate 
a bear in a menagerie, or an Indian on a reserva- 
tion. It is quite another thing to exercise tolera- 
tion toward either in the life-and-death grip of a 
frontier struggle. 

These men had seen their homes go up in flames. 
They had heard the blood-curdling war-whoop. 
They had counted the bloody scalps hanging at 
the Indian's belt, and marked on them the hair of 
those they loved. It was idle to preach toleration 
to them. Henceforward for many years it was 
war to the knife. 

Yet, both as friend and foe, the Indian had 
given the colonists many lessons. He had 
taught them the culture of maize and tobacco, 
he had taught them to stalk the deer, to trap 
the bear, and to blaze the forest path. Many a 
lesson in woodcraft the settlers learned from him. 
Washington's shrewdness in borrowing native 
methods of warfare, would, had his advice been 
taken, have saved Braddock's army from utter rout 
136 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

in the Western forests. The very enmity of the 
Indian was a help to the Colonial Cavalier, whose 
ease-loving temperament might easily have stink 
into sloth had it not felt the spur of danger and the 
necessity for being on the alert. The docility of 
the negro was a perpetual temptation to the white 
man to the abuse of arbitrary power, but the resist- 
ance of the Indian was a constant reminder that 
here was a force unsubdued and unsubduable. 

Of the influence of the white men on the Indian, 
the less said the better. They eradicated none of 
his vices, and they lent him many of their own. 
They found him abstinent, and they made him a 
guzzler of firewater. The) 7 found him hospitable, 
and they made him suspicious and vindictive. 
They found him in freedom, the owner of a great 
country; they robbed him of the one, and crowded 
him out of the other. 

An old sachem in the eighteenth century, meet- 
ing a surveyor, said to him : " The French claim 
all the land on one side of the Ohio, the English 
claim all the land on the other side. Now, where 
does the Indian's land lie?" 

The savages exchanged their corn and tobacco 
for the rum-cask and the firearms of civilization, 
and a strange jumble of a new religion, whose 
ceremonies they grafted onto their own, with gro- 
tesque results. It is hard to say whether they 

137 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

fared worst as the white man's friends or foes. 
When the English made a treaty with the Chicka- 
homanies, "a lustie and a daring people," these 
were the terms offered them by the whites : 

"First: They should for ever bee called Eng- 
lishmen and bee true subiects to King James and 
his Deputies. 

"Secondly: Neither to kill nor detaine any of 
our men, nor cattell, but bring them home. 

" Thirdly : To bee alwaies ready to furnish us 
with three hundred men, against the Spaniards or 
any. 

" Fourthly : They shall not enter our townes, 
but send word they are new Englishmen. 

" Fifthly : That every fighting man, at the begin- 
ning of harvest shall bring to our store two bushels 
of corne for tribute, for which they shall receive 
so many hatchets. 

"Lastly: The eight chief e men should see all 
this performed or receive the punishment them- 
selves; for their diligence they should have a red 
coat, a copper chaine, and King James his picture, 
and be accounted his noblemen." 

This shameful bargain is recorded by the Eng- 
lish with evident self-satisfaction, and apparently 
without a suspicion that they need blush for the 
transaction. Yet when the Indian met treachery 

138 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

with treachery, and fraud with guile, the civilized 
settlers were ablaze with indignation for no better 
reason than that the savages had learned of them, 
and bettered their instructions. 
139 



His Amusements 




Ait pro: (Kctjestjcma Be !)ttam£«f/ 

,F all the amuse- 
ments of the 
Colonial Cavalier, 
none was so popular 
as gambling. The 
law strove in vain to 
break it up. This statute in the Colonial Record, 
tells its own story: "Against gaming at dice and 
cardes, be it ordained by this prefent affembly 
that the winners and loofers fhall forfaicte ten 
fhillings a man, one ten fhillings thereof to go to 
the difcoverer, and the reft to pious ufes. " I fear 
very little was ever collected for pious uses. The 
difficulty lay in the fact that, as every one played, 
there was no one to act the spy. 

This passion for gaming in the colonies was only 
a reflection of the craze in England. For more 
than a century after the return of Charles the Sec- 
ond, the rattle of the dice-box, and the shuffling 
of cards were the most familiar sounds in every 
London chocolate-house. Young sinners and old 
spent their fortunes, and misspent their lives, play- 
ing for money at Brooke's or Boodle's. When a 
man fell dead at the door of White's, he was 

143 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

dragged into the hall amid bets as to whether he 
were dead or alive, and the surgeon's aid was vio- 
lently opposed, on the ground of unfairness to those 
betting on the side of death. The Duke of St. 
Albans, at eighty, too blind to see the cards, went 
regularly to a gambling-house with an attendant. 
Lady Castlemaine lost twenty-five thousand pounds 
in one night's play. General Braddock's sister, 
having gamed away her fortune at Bath, fin- 
ished the comedy by hanging herself. When her 
affectionate brother heard the news, he remarked 
jocularly, " Poor Fanny, I always thought she 
would play till she was forced to tuck herself 
up." 

I offer all this testimony to show that our Co- 
lonial Cavalier was only the child of his age, when 
he too shook the dice, and shuffled the cards. Being 
short of cash, his bets were generally made in to- 
bacco, or, failing that, in flesh and blood. Many 
a slave found a new master in the morning, be- 
cause his old master had been unlucky at play the 
night before. 

In a community so absorbed in the excitement of 
hazard, the lottery of course took deep hold. The 
first plantation in America was aided by a grand 
"standing lottery," with along list of "welcomes, 
prises and rewards," amounting to more than ten 
thousand crowns. The declaration sets forth that 
144 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

" all prises, welcomes and rewards drawne wher- 
ever they dwell, shall of the treasurer have present 
pay, and whosoever under one name or poesie pay- 
eth three pound in ready money, shall receive six 
shillings and eight pence, or a silver spoone of that 
value at his choice." 

"The money for the Adventurers is to be paid 
to Sir Thomas Smith, Knight, and Treasurer for 
Virginia, or such officers as he shall appoint in City 
or Country, under the common seale of the com- 
pany for the receit thereof. " 

The example thus set, was followed whenever 
the colonies felt a pressure for money. In Vir- 
ginia a lottery was established to meet the expenses 
of the French and Indian War — the drawing di- 
rected to be "in the Burgesses' Room of the Capi- 
tal at Williamsburgh at ten in the morning. 
Prizes current money from ^5 to ^2000. The 
lucky numbers to be published in the Gazette." 

In Maryland, in the eighteenth century, a 
" Scheme of Lottery is humbly proposed to the 
Public for Raising the sum of 510 pounds, current 
money, to be applied towards completeing the 
Market-House in Baltimore-Town in Baltimore 
Co., buying two Fi re-Engines and a parcel of 
Leather-Buckets for the use of the said Town, 
enlarging the present Public Wharf and Building 
a new one." 

145 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

If gambling was a favorite pastime and the 
lottery a popular excitement, the Cavalier was not 
a stranger to manlier sports. Of a brave and ar- 
dent temper, and a fine physique, he found at once 
his work and play in the hardy amusements of the 
chase. He had learned from the Indian to stalk the 
deer, walking stealthily behind his horse till a 
good chance offered to shoot close at hand, and lay 
the unsuspecting deer at his feet. Sometimes, in 
the bright October weather, the air would be blue 
with the smoke of the fires built to start the game. 
Now, in his heavy leather boots, he would start 
afoot after wild hare, or by the light of the moon, 
with a band of servants and dogs, he would hunt the 
'possum and the coon. This habit of hunting was 
so universal that the Colonial Cavalier well merited 
the sarcasm of The Spectator, which described the 
English country gentleman as lying under the 
curse pronounced in the words of Goliath, " I will 
give thee to the fowls of the air and to the beasts of 
the field. " Hunting as a sport may not be spiritu- 
alizing, but it certainly is not brutalizing, and as 
much cannot be said for all the sports of that day, 
in the Southern colonies of America. 

The cock-fight and the gouging-match never 

lacked as eager a throng of spectators, as gathers 

to-day at a football game; yet both were brutal 

and disgusting. They roused the amazement of 

146 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

every foreigner, that such things should be toler- 
ated in a civilized country. The gouging-match 
was simply a fight of the lowest order. Not only 
were fists freely used, but the test of success was the 
ability of the stronger bully to gouge out the eye 
of his adversary. The under man could only save 
his sight by humiliating himself to cry out, " Kings 
Cruse!" or "Enough!" 

Anbury, who witnessed several of these matches, 
says : " I have seen a fellow, reckoned a great adept 
in gouging, who constantly kept the nails of both 
his thumb and second finger long and pointed; 
nay, to prevent their breaking or splitting, he 
hardened them every evening in a candle." 

So familiar was this brutal practice that it sup- 
plied a Southern orator in after 3 T ears with a 
rhetorical climax when, inciting his countrymen 
to make war on the mercantile interests of Great 
Britain, he exclaimed: " Commerce is the apple of 
England's eye. There let us gouge her!" 

The cock-fight was scarcely less degrading than 
the gouging-match. When a fight was an- 
nounced, the news spread like lightning, and from 
all over the country people came thronging, some 
bringing cocks to be entered in the match, but all 
with money or tobacco to bet on the result. The 
scene was one of wild excitement. Men and boys 
cheered on their favorites, and watched with de- 

147 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

light, while the furious cocks thrust at each other 
with their long- spurs of cruel steel. 

It is pleasant to turn away from such scenes and 
sports as these, to read of the Knights of the Golden 
Horseshoe riding up into the wild fastnesses of the 
Blue Ridge Mountains with Governor Spotswood. 
It was a right knightly expedition, and one of the 
most picturesque in American history. They 
wound through the forest, and forded the rivers, 
and climbed rocky mountains, and took possession 
of peak after peak in the name of " His Majesty 
George the Third." Their horses were shod with 
iron, which was not usual in those days, and on 
their return, Governor Spotswood presented each 
of the Cavaliers as a memento of the journey, with 
a tiny gold horse-shoe, set with jewels, and bearing 
the legend, " Sic juvat transcendere montes." The 
thrifty old king disapproved of this extravagance, 
and left the Governor to pay for the mementoes out 
of his own pocket. 

Riding on horseback was the chief recreation, 
as well as the chief mode of getting about, at the 
South. As the planters grew richer, they de- 
lighted to own fine horses and outfits. Washing- 
ton's letter-book contains an order sent to London 
for elaborate equipments: " i man's riding saddle, 
hogskin seat, large plated stirrups, double-reined 
bridle and Pelham bit plated. A very neat and 
148 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

fashionable Newmarket saddle-cloth. A large 
and best portmanteau, saddle, bridle and pillion, 
cloak-bag, and surcingle. A riding-frock of a 
handsome drab - coloured broadcloth with plain 
double gilt buttons. A riding waistcoat of super- 
fine scarlet cloth and gold lace, with buttons like 
those of the coat. A blue surtout coat. A neat 
switch whip, silver cap. Black velvet cap for 
servant. " 

Washington, as methodical in private affairs as 
in public, kept in his household books, a register 
of the names and ages of his horses and his dogs. 
Here we may read the entire family history of 
Ajax and Blueskin, Valiant and Magnolia, or of the 
foxhounds Vulcan, Singer, Ringwood, Music, and 
True Love. 

There was a peculiar intimacy between the fox- 
hounds and their master, for they were associated 
with some of the happiest hours of his life, and 
when they came in from a field-day, torn by the 
briars through which they had struggled or limp- 
ing from thorns in the foot, they were tenderly 
cared for, bandaged, and looked after. No amuse- 
ment so delighted Washington as riding across 
country with Lord Fairfax in one of the hunts which 
that gentleman and sportsman was so fond of organ- 
izing at Greenaway Court. On a brisk yet soft 
autumn morning, through the blue Virginia haze, 
149 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

the gentry for miles around came to the " meet. " 
The huntsmen might be heard urging on the dogs 
with cries of "Yoicks! Yoicks! Have at him! 
Push him up ! " till the fox, which had doubled on 
its tracks, round and round the thick covert, at 
length broke away, and the cry was raised of 
"Tally-ho! Gone away!" The huntsman blew his 
horn, the whipper-in cracked his whip, the hounds 
were in full cry, and the entire field of scarlet- 
coated riders broke in, in a mad gallop, through 
brush and briar. A strong fox will " live" before 
hounds on an average of an hour, but sometimes 
the hunt lasted all day, and covered thirty miles or 
more. The lessons of endurance, of woodcraft, and 
of hard)' strength, which the Virginia gentlemen 
learned in these hunts, stood them in good stead 
in the life-and-death struggle on sterner fields. 

A great lover of animals was Charles Lee, who 
was always surrounded by a troop of dogs, and who 
made himself somewhat unwelcome as a visitor, 
by insisting on bringing them into the house with 
him wherever he went. " I must have some object 
to embrace," he once wrote to a friend. "When 
I can be convinced that men are as worthy objects 
as dogs, I shall transfer my benevolence, and be- 
come as staunch a philanthropist as the canting 
Addison affected to be." 

Apparently he never changed his mind, but died 
150 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

still devoted to his dogs and his horses. Men who 
loved horses, of course loved horse-racing as well. 
The Carolina Jockey Club was a famous institu- 
tion. Its annual races drew crowds from the 
neighboring country, and the population gave 
itself up to several days' festivity, ending in a 
ball. In Virginia, the sport was no less popular. 
The Gazette of October, 1737, announces that "On 
St. Andrew's Day, there are to be horse-races and 
several other Diversions for the entertainment of 
the Gentlemen and Ladies at the Old Field." 
The programme of this entertainment recalls the 
days of Merrie England. Besides the race of 
twenty horses for a prize of five pounds, the ad- 
vertisement gives notice : 

" That a hat of the value of 20s. be cudgelled for, 
and that after the first challenge be made, the 
Drums are to beat every quarter of an hour for 3 
challenges round the Ring, and none to play with 
their left hand. 

"That a violin be played for by 20 Fiddles, no 
person to have the liberty of playing unless he 
bring his fiddle with him. After the prize is won, 
they are all to play together, and each a different 
tune, and to be treated by the company. 

" That 12 Boys of 12 years of age do run 112 yds, 
for a hat of the cost of 12 shillings. 

" That a flag be flying on said Day, 30 feet high. 
151 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

"That a handsome entertainment be provided 
for the subscribers and their wives ; and such of 
them as are not so happy as to have wives, may 
treat any other lady. 

" That drums, trumpets and hautboys be pro- 
vided to play at said entertainment. 

" That after dinner the Royal Health, His Honor 
the Governor's, etc., are to be drunk. 

" That a Quire of Ballads be sung for, by a num- 
ber of songsters, all of them to have liquor suffi- 
cient to clear their wind-pipes. 

" That a pair of silver buckles be wrestled for, 
by a number of brisk young men. 

" That a pair of handsome shoes be danced for. 

" That a pair of handsome silk stockings, of one 
pistole value, be given to the handsomest young 
country maid that appears in the field — with many 
other whimsical and comical diversions too numer- 
ous to mention. 

" And as this mirth is designed to be purely in- 
nocent and void of offense, all persons resorting 
there are desired to behave themselves with de- 
cency and sobriety." 

There is a delightful heartiness and simplicity 
about all this racing, and chasing, and dancing, and 
jigging, and fiddling. Folks had not learned to 
take their pleasure sadly. They still found clowns 
funny, and shouted with laughter over the efforts 
152 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

to climb greased poles and catch slippery pigs, 
and, above all, they delighted in the barbecue. At 
these great open-air feasts animals were roasted 
whole over enormous fires. Huge bowls of punch 
circled round the long tables spread under the 
trees, and when the feast was done the negroes 
gathered up the fragments and made merry, late 
into the night. 

All the English holidays were observed in the 
Cavalier Colonies in addition to some local festi- 
vals. Eddis writes from Annapolis in old colony 
days: "Besides our regular assemblies, every 
mark of attention is paid to the patron saint of 
each parent dominion; and St. George, St. An- 
drew, St. Patrick, and St. David are celebrated with 
every partial mark of national attachment. Gen- 
eral invitations are given, and the appearance is 
always numerous and splendid. The Americans 
on this part of the continent have likewise a saint, 
whose history, like those of the above venerable 
characters, is lost in sable uncertainty. The first 
of May is, however, set apart to the memory of 
Saint Tamina (Tammany) ; on which occasion the 
natives wear a piece of a buck's tail in their hats, 
or in some conspicuous situation. During the 
course of the evening, and generally in the midst 
of a dance, the company are interrupted by the 
sudden intrusion of a number of persons habited 
153 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

like Indians, who rush violently into the room, 
singing the war-song, giving the whoop, and danc- 
ing in the style of those people; after which cere- 
mony, a collection is made, and they retire, well 
satisfied with their reception and entertainment." 

In addition to such festivities as these, the King's 
birthnight was celebrated with illuminations and 
joy-fires, and Christmas in Maryland and Virginia 
recalled the gayety of the dear old home festival. 
The halls were filled with holly and mistletoe, 
which refuse to grow in the chill New Eng- 
land air, but may be gathered in the woods of 
Virginia as freely as in England; the yule log 
was kindled on the hospitable hearth, and the 
evening ended with a dance. 

It was a dancing age. None were too old or too 
dignified to join in the pastime. We have it on 
the authority of General Greene that on one occa- 
sion Washington danced for three hours without 
once sitting down. Patrick Henry would close the 
doors of his office to betake himself to dancing or 
fiddling, and Jefferson dearly loved to rosin his 
bow for a merry jig. The story is told of him 
that once, when away from home, he received 
news of the burning of his father's house. " Did 
you save any of my books?" he asked of the slave 
who brought him the tidings. "No, Massa," 
answered the negro, "but we saved the fiddle!" 

154 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

At the entertainments in the " Palace" at Wil- 
liamsburg, the Governor himself opened the ball, 
with the most distinguished lady present, in the 
stately figures of the minuet. Afterward young 
and old joined in the livelier motions of the Vir- 
ginia Reel. This dance, in spite of its name, did 
not spring from Virginia soil, but was adopted 
from an old English dance known as " The Hemp- 
Dressers," whose figures represent the process of 
weaving, as its couples shoot from side to side, then 
over and under, like a shuttle, and finally unite, 
as the threads tighten and draw the cloth to- 
gether. 

The Governor's palace did not absorb all the 
gayety of Williamsburg. Who has not heard of 
the Raleigh Tavern, with its leaden bust of Sir 
Walter, and its crowning glory of " The Apollo 
Room," named doubtless for that famous "Apollo 
Room" in the "Devil's Tavern," Fleet Street, 
where Shakespeare and Jonson held their bouts of 
wit and wine? 

If we could have crept up to the Raleigh Tavern 
some night, early in the last half of the last cen- 
tury, and peeped through the small-paned windows 
of " the Apollo, " we might have seen a party of gay 
collegians making merry with their sweethearts 
and friends. This tall youth, with sandy hair and 
gray eyes, is Tom Jefferson, who is offering his 

i55 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

awkward homage at the shrine of Miss 'Becca Bur- 
well. Near them is Jefferson's most intimate 
friend, Jack Page, dancing with his Nancy. Yon- 
der, near the wide fireplace, between Sukey Potter 
and Betsy Moore, stands Ben Harrison, a mere boy 
still, though soon to enter the House of Burgesses, 
and over there in the corner, gravely surveying the 
dancers, is the uniformed figure of the young sol- 
dier, George Washington. Should we have read 
in these youthful faces a promise of the parts they 
were destined to play on the world's stage? Prob- 
ably no more than we should have foreseen this 
gay ballroom turned into the hall of a political 
assembly, where the first birth-cry of American 
freedom is heard. 

We can get whatever impression we choose of 
Williamsburg and its society by selecting our 
authority judiciously. Burnaby, who visited it in 
1759, describes it as a pleasant little town, with 
wooden houses straggling along unpaved streets ; 
while Hugh Jones writes, thirty years earlier, that 
many good families live here " who dress after the 
same modes and behave themselves exactly as the 
Gentry in London. " " Most families of any note, " 
he adds, "have a coach, chariot, Berlin or chaise." 

The city, so he says, is well stocked with rich 
stores, and " at the Governor's House upon Birth- 
nights and at Balls and Assemblies, I have seen as 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

fine an appearance, as good diversion, and as splen- 
did entertainments in Governor Spotswood's time 
as I have seen anywhere." 

When Governor Botetourt (pronounced after the 
English fashion, Bottatot) came over to Virginia, 
he took the oath of office here at Williamsburg, 
and rode in state in a great coach drawn by six 
milk-white horses. After the oath had been ad- 
ministered, a grand supper was given in his honor 
at the Raleigh Tavern. The Gazette gives a full 
account of the affair. An ode was sung, begin- 
ning : 

" He comes ! His Excellency comes 

To cheer Virginia's plains. 
Fill, your brisk bowls, ye loyal sons, 

And sing your loftiest strains ! 
Be this your glory, this your boast, 
Lord Botetourt's the favorite toast. 

Triumphant wreaths entwine ! 
Fill your bumpers swiftly round, 
And make } r our spacious rooms resound 

With music, joy and wine !" 

The air being ended, the recitative took up the 
strain of effusive compliment : 

"Search every garden, strip the shrubby bowers, 
And strew his path with sweet autumnal flowers ! 
Ye virgins, haste ; prepare the fragrant rose 
And with triumphant laurels crown his brows !" 

157 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

The virgins thus called forth, appeared from their 
"shrubby bowers," bearing roses and laurel, and 
singing, as they advanced toward the hero of the 
evening : 

"See, we've stripped each flowery bed — 
Here's laurels for his lordly head, 
And while Virginia is his care, 
May he protect the virtuous fair !" 

As I looked on Lord Botetourt's statue, and 
marked its moss-covered figure and its fatuously 
smiling face, robbed of its nose b) r the stone of 
contempt, I remembered this festival, and mused 
on the vicissitudes of fame. 

In the year 1752 anew delight was opened to. 
the provincials. Hallam's company of comedians 
came over in The Charmi?ig Sally to act for 
them. A playbill of that year announces that 
" at the new theatre in Annapolis by the company 
of comedians, on Monday next, being the sixth of 
this instant July, will be performed The Busy Body, 
likewise a farce called The Lying Valet. To begin 
precisely at 7 o'clock. Tickets to be had at the 
printing-office. No persons to be admitted behind 
the scenes. Box seats 10s., pit 7s. 6d, gallery 5s." 
A later bill announces that " children in laps will 
not be admitted." 

The favorite plays given by Hallam's Company 
seem to have been — 

158 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

"The Suspicions Husband," "Othello," "The 
Mock Doctor," "Romeo and Juliet," "The Devil 
To Pay," "A Bold Strokeior a Wife," and " Miss 
In Her Teens; or, A Medley of Lovers." 

Our squeamish age would find much to shock, 
and perhaps little to amuse, in many of those old 
plays. Congreve's shameless muse set the pace, 
and the Nell Gwynns of the stage kept it. If we 
wonder that our ancestors could listen and look, 
will not our descendants wonder equally at us? 

Before Hallam and his company came over to 
set up a professional standard, amateur theatricals 
were the rage. The Virginia Gazette in 1736 an- 
nounces a performance of " The Beaux' Stratagemhy 
the gentlemen and ladies of this county," and also 
that the students of the college are to give The 
Tragedy of Cato at the theatre. Somehow, Addi- 
son's tragedies seem further removed from our 
sympathies than Congreve's comedies, and we 
turn with relief to a form of amusement always 
in fashion and forever modern, the time-honored 
entertainment of feasting. 

In 1744, a grand dinner was given by Governor 
Gooch to visiting statesmen at Annapolis. Wil- 
liam Black, who was present, records in his journal 
that "Punch was served before dinner, which was 
sumptuous, with wines in great abundance, fol- 
lowed by strawberries and ice-cream, a great 

159 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

rarity." These public banquets were momentous 
affairs, demanding a sound digestion and a steady 
head in those guests who wished to live to dine 
another day. Chastellux gives a vivid account of 
their customs. "The dinner," he writes, "is 
served in the American or, if you will, in the 
English fashion, consisting of two courses, 
one comprehending the entrees, the roast meat 
and the warm side-dishes; the other, the sweet 
pastry and confectionery. When this is removed, 
the cloth is taken off, and apples, nuts, and chest- 
nuts are served. It is then that healths are drunk. " 
This custom of drinking healths, he finds pleasant 
enough, inasmuch as it serves to stimulate and 
prolong conversation. But he says, " I find it an 
absurd and truly barbarous practice, the first time 
you drink, and at the beginning of the dinner, to 
call out successively to each individual, to let him 
know you drink his health. The actor in this 
ridiculous comedy is sometimes ready to die with 
thirst, whilst he is obliged to inquire the names, or 
catch the eyes, of twenty-five or thirty persons." 

The woes of the diner and winer do not, it 
seems, end with this general call, for he is con- 
stantly called, and having his sleeve pulled, to at- 
tract his attention, now this way, now that. " These 
general and partial attacks end in downright duels. 
They call to you from one end of the table to the 
1 60 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

other: 'Sir, will you permit me to drink a glass of 
wine with you?' " 

Allowing- for some exaggeration on the part of 
the lively Frenchman, it is easy to see what quan- 
tities of Madeira and " Phyall" must have been 
drunk in those tournaments of courtesy, and I do 
not wonder to read in the journal of a young wom- 
an of the eighteenth century:- "The gentlemen 
are returned from dinner. Both tipsy!" 

"The Tuesday Club," of Maryland, had many a 
jovial supper together. Their toasts always began 
with "The Ladies," followed by "The King's 
Majesty," and after that " The Deluge." I find a 
suggestive regulation made by this club, that each 
member should bring his own sand-box, " to save 
the carpet." 

Parson Bacon sanctified these convivial meet- 
ings by his presence and was, by all accounts, the 
ringleader of the boisterous revels. Jonathan 
Boucher, another clergyman, but of a very differ- 
ent type, was a great clubman too. He was one 
of the leading spirits of "The Hommony Club," 
whose avowed object was "to promote innocent 
mirth and ingenious humor." 

The days of women's clubs were still in the far 
future, and the chief excitement of the ladies was 
an occasional ball. The Maryland assemblies be- 
gan at six o'clock in the evening, and were sup- 

161 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

posed to end at ten, though the young folks often 
coaxed and cajoled the authorities into later hours. 
Card parties were part of the entertainment, and 
whist was enlivened by playing for money. The 
supper was often furnished from the ladies' 
kitchens and the gentlemen's gamebags, and was 
a tempting one. The costumes were rich and 
imposing. A witness of one of these Maryland 
balls writes: "The gentlemen, dressed in short 
breeches, wore handsome knee-buckles, silk stock- 
ings, buckled pumps, etc. The ladies wore — God 
knows what; I don't!" 

Dancing and music were the chief branches 
of the eighteenth-century maiden's education. 
I can fancy, as I read that " Patsy Custis and 
Milly Posey are gone to Colonel Mason's to the 
dancing-school," how they held up their full petti- 
coats, and pointed out the toes of their red-heeled 
shoes, and dreamed of future conquests, although 
for one of them the tomb was already preparing 
its chill embrace. 

For women, life in town was pleasant enough 
with its tea-drinkings, its afternoon visits, and its 
evening assemblies, but on the plantations far 
from neighbors time must often have hung heavy 
on their hands. Yet even there, pleasures could 
be found, or made. When evening shut down over 
the lonely manor-houses along the Chesapeake, the 

162 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER 



myrtleberry candles were lighted, the slender- 
legged mahogany tables drawn out, and the Col- 
onial dames seated themselves to an evening of 
cards. Small stakes were played 
for to heighten the interest of 
"Triumph, Ruff and Honors," 
"Gleke," or "Quadrille;" and 
when these lost their charm, there 
was the spinet to turn to. 






$ 




Spioei- 



In those primitive days people still loved melody. 
"A little music" was called for with enthusiasm, 
and given without hesitation. There was no 
scientific criticism to be feared when the young 
men and maidens "raised a tune." Their list of 

163 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

songs was not long ; but familiarity lent a deeper 
charm than novelty. " Gaze not on Swans" was a 
favorite in the seventeenth century. " Push about 
the Brisk Bowl," while well enough at the hunt 
supper table, was banished from the drawing- 
room in favor of "Beauty, Retire!" a song begin- 
ning— 

" Beauty, retire ! thou dost my pitty move ; 
Believe my pitty and then trust my love. " 

The writer does not make it quite clear why he 
wishes Beauty to retire, nor why she moves his 
pity. In fact, the case seems quite reversed in 
the last stanza: 

"With niew and painfulle arts 
Of studied warr I breake the hearts 
Of half the world ; and shee breakes mine ; 
And shee, and shee, and shee breakes mine !" 

Through the lapse of more than one century, we 
hear the echo of those young voices, rising and 
falling in the -air and counter of the quaint old 
melodies. 

Oh, those shadowy corners of candle-lighted 
rooms, those spinets, those duos and trios, those 
ruffled squires and brocaded dames! — where are 
they now? 

164 



His Man-Servants and His 
Maid-Servants 




Man- Servants 
Maid 
Servants, 



J his 




JOVE fixed it certain 
That wbateuer clay 
stakes a manjlaue. 
Takes half /jis worth awaj 



ANEW ENGLAND farm- 
house and a Southern planta- 
tion: — What a contrast the two presented in 
colonial days! In the homes of Massachusetts 
and Connecticut, the notable housewife was up 
before light, breaking the ice over the water, of 
a winter morning, preparing with her own hands 
the savory sausages and buckwheat cakes for the 
men's breakfast, and setting the house in order. 
To her it fell to take charge of the wool from the 
back of the sheep till it reached the back of her boy ; 
carding, spinning, weaving, dyeing the wool, cut- 
ting the cloth, and sewing the seams, scouring floors 
and washing dishes ; all these duties fell to the share 
of the Puritan Priscillas. Yet, when evening fell, 
when the dishes were shelved on the dresser, these 

167 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

busy housewives, in their sanded kitchens, with the 
firelight reflected from their shining tins, were not 
to be pitied, even in comparison with their more 
luxuriously attended sisters in Maryland or 
Virginia. 

Life at the South was at once grander and 
shabbier, than in New England. The Southerner's 
ease-loving nature had the power to ignore detail ; 
and it is attention to detail which brings well-being 
to the household and wrinkles to the housekeeper. 
A thousand slaves could not take the place of one 
woman of "faculty." In fact, the more shiftless, 
lazy negroes there were, the less order and tidiness 
prevailed. But order and tidiness were not indis- 
pensable to happiness there and then, and the sum 
of human enjoyment was large on those old plan- 
tations, in spite of shiftlessness and slavery. Of 
that restless ambition which corrodes modern life, 
men had little, women had none, and servants less 
than none. The negro was a true child of the 
tropics, and with food and sunshine enough, was 
merry as the day is long. 

A healthy negro, on a prosperous estate, under 
the charge of a gentleman, not under the bane of an 
overseer, came perhaps as near to animal cheerful- 
ness as mortal often does. The master enjoyed 
that serenity and leisure which freedom from 
manual labor gives; his children grew up, each 
168 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

with a personal retainer attached to himself with 
the old feudal loyalty ; the lady of the house was 
again the old Saxon hlaefdige, who gave out the 
bread to the tribe of servants day by day. Yet 
with all the brightness which can be thrown into 
the picture, slavery was a curse alike to slave and 
slave-owner, on account both of what it brought 
and what it took away. 

It is strange to note how silently and unper- 
ceived the black cloud of slavery stole over the 
Colonial Cavalier. A casual entry in John Rolfe's 
journal records: " About the last of August came 
in a dutch man of warre that sold vs twenty 
Negars." Before the arrival of this fatal vessel 
life-servitude was unknown. The system of ap- 
prenticeship, and what would now be called contract 
labor, prevailed. These indented white servants 
were either transported convicts, sold for a season 
to the planters, or, like the Maryland redemptioners, 
poor immigrants, who contracted to serve for a 
period of time equivalent to the cost of their pas- 
sage, which was prepaid to the master of the ship 
on which they came. 

The work of these indented servants was not 
excessive. " Five dayes and a halfe in the sum- 
mer," said one who knew the situation from ex- 
perience, "is the allotted time that they worke 
and, for two months, when the sun predominates 

169 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

in the highest pitch of his heat, they claim an an- 
tient and customary Priviledge, to repose them- 
selves three hours in the day, within the house. 
In Winter they do little but hunt and build 
fires." 

The Sot- Weed Factor gives a much less rose- 
colored account of the life of a redemptioner. A 
woman-servant in the poem, looking back on her 
life in England, exclaims: 

"Not then a slave for twice two year, 
My cloathes were fashionably new, 
Nor were my shifts of linnen blue. 
But things are changed : Now at the Hoe 
I daily work and Barefoot go, 
In weeding corn, or feeding Swine 
I spend my melancholy time." 

A "melancholy time" many of the redemp- 
tioners must have had in their enforced service ; 
but if the master proved too severe, the indented 
servant had the privilege of selecting another, 
and the original employer was indemnified for his 
loss. Susan Frizell, who had run away from her 
master, was recaptured and brought before the 
court for punishment ; but her accounts of ill-usage 
so moved the authorities, that they remitted the 
extra term of service to which running away had 
made her liable, and only demanded that she 
should earn under a new master the five hundred 
170 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

pounds of tobacco to be paid to her old employer. 
The bystanders were so touched by poor Susan's 
pitiful situation that they collected six hundred 
pounds on the spot, and sent Susan on her way re- 
joicing, with a capital of one hundred pounds of 
tobacco to give her a new start in the world. 

The law provided that the servant, when his 
time of service expired, should receive a portion 
of goods sufficient to make him an independent 
freeman, who might rise to be a councillor or an 
assemblyman. A Colonial statute directs that " at 
the end of said terme of service, the master or mis- 
tress of such servant shall give unto such man or 
maid-servant, 3 barrels, a hilling hoe and a felling 
axe; and to a man-servant, one new cloth suite, 
one new shirte, 1 new paire shoes, and a new Mon- 
mouth capp ; and to a maid-servant, 1 new petty- 
coat and waistcoat, 1 new smock, 1 pair new shoes, 
1 pair new stockings and the cloaths formerly be- 
longing to the servant." 

The advantage of this system of indented service 
lay in its gradual absorption of the immigrant 
population, who thus had time to understand the 
laws and institutions of their new country before 
they became in their turn citizens and lawmakers. 
The disadvantage lay in the encouragement it 
gave to kidnapping. Many children and young 
people in the seaboard towns of England were 

171 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

beguiled, or carried by force, on shipboard, to be 
sold as servants in the colonies. The kidnappers, 
or "spirits," as they were commonly called, served 
as bugaboos in many an English nursery to 
frighten naughty children into obedience under 
threat of being spirited away to America. 

Howells' "State-Trials" contains a pitiful ac- 
count of the experiences of a young nobleman sold 
as a white servant in Virginia through the plot of 
his covetous uncle, who wanted his property. The 
nephew is a mere child when he begins his appren- 
ticeship in the provinces, but, by a series of at- 
tempts to escape, he prolongs his term of service 
till, when he finally succeeds in getting back to 
England to claim his own from the treacherous un- 
cle, he is a man grown, and as difficult of recogni- 
tion as the Tichborne claimant. The great 
majority of the first indented servants sent over, 
however, were convicts ripe for the jail or the 
gallows, and only respited to be transported to 
the colonies, which long suffered from the intro- 
duction of such a class of citizens. 

The records of Middlesex County, England, tell 
their own story : 

3 April, 15 James I. 

Stephen Rogers, for killing George Watkins against the 
form of Statute of the first year of King James, convicted 
of manslaughter, was sentenced to be hung, but at the in- 
172 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

stance of Sir Thomas Smith, Kn't > was reprieved in the 
interest of Virginia, because he was a carpenter. 

6 August, id James I. 

On his conviction of incorrigible vagabondage Ralph 
Rookes was reprieved at Sheriff Johnson's order so that he 
should be sent to Virginia. 

28 April, 18 James I. 

On her conviction by a Jury of stealing divers goods of 
Mary Payne, Elizabeth Handsley was reprieved for Vir- 
ginia. 

3 1 st May, 18 James I. 

On his conviction of stealing Richard Atkinson's bull, 
William Hill asked for the book, and was respited, for Vir- 
ginia. 

The records teem with such cases. Yet these were 
not the only representatives of indented servants. 
In the course of the various successive political 
upheavals which shook England, it chanced that 
many gentlemen of good birth and breeding were 
driven over to the colonies, to begin life there at the 
foot of the ladder. After Monmouth's Rebellion 
several hundred citizens, some of eminent stand- 
ing, were sent to Virginia. "Take care," wrote 
the king, "that they continue to serve for ten 
years at least, and that they be not permitted in 
any manner to redeem themselves by money or 
otherwise, until that term be fully expired." 
Despite the royal warning, these exiles were par- 

173 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

doned before the term was ended, and became 
most useful and valuable citizens. 

Well had it been for the Cavalier colonies had 
they adhered to this system of apprenticeship and 
indented service. Their children and their chil- 
dren's children might then have sung of "the 
nobility of labor, the long pedigree of toil." But 
with the widespread introduction of negro slavery, 
came the degradation of labor. The negro rep- 
resented a despised caste. He labored ; therefore 
labor was contemptible. Henceforth there was 
established an aristocracy of ease and wealth, rest- 
ing on a foundation of unpaid labor. 

With the establishment of slavery there grew 
up a more marked distinction of classes among 
the whites. A wide gulf separated rich and poor. 
Devereux Jarratt, son of a Virginia carpenter, 
writes in his autobiography: "We were accus- 
tomed to look upon gentlefolks as beings of a 
superior order. For my part, I was quite shy of 
them and kept off a humble distance. A peri- 
wig in those days was a distinguishing badge of 
gentlefolk ; and when I saw a man riding the road 
with a wig on, it would so alarm my fears, and 
give me such a disagreeable feeling, that I dare 
say I would run as for my life." 

Thus society became stratified : At the top, the 
great landholders, below them the small planters 

174 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

aping the manners and customs of their rich neigh- 
bors, and underneath, the population composed of 
poor whites and overseers. The negroes were no 
more part of the social system than the oxen they 
drove a-field. 

It is a curious commentary on the Scriptural 
principle of turning the other cheek to the smiter, 
that the Indians, who resisted the encroachments 
of the whites and waved the tomahawk in response 
to the echo of the Englishman's gun, were feared 
and respected, while the blacks, who yielded 
meekly to the yoke of servitude, met at best only a 
good-natured contempt. 

The masters' consciousness of the injustice of 
slavery made them fearful of revolt and revenge, 
which the slaves had neither skill nor energy to 
plan. The whole machinery of the law was di- 
rected to the suppression of this imaginary dan- 
ger. All gatherings of slaves were strictly forbid- 
den. If found at a distance from the plantations, 
any negro was subject to lashes on the bare back. 
It was not counted a felony to kill a slave while 
punishing him. Negroes, and indented servants 
as well, who attempted to escape were whipped 
and branded on the cheek with the letter R, and 
on a repetition of the offence they might be put to 
death. No punishment was too severe for this 
crime of running away, curiously denominated in 

i75 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

the old statutes "stealth of one's self." Among 
the enormous offences set forth in a Maryland Act of 
1638 I find, " Harboring or clokeing of another's 
servant without the knowledge and consent of the 
Master or Mistress." 

In spite of all precautions, a slave did succeed, 
now and then, in gaining his freedom. It is with 
great satisfaction that I read an old Act of Assem- 
bly, setting forth that "Whereas a negro named 
Billy, slave to John Tillit, has for several years 
unlawfully absented himself from his master's 
service, said Billy is pronounced an outlaw, and a 
bounty of a thousand pounds of tobacco set on his 
head." The bounty does not trouble me, for I 
feel sure that the craft and strength which made 
Billy an outlaw, kept him safe from the bolts 
aimed against him by the colonial legislature. 

The statute-books of Maryland and Virginia are 
records of the barbarity into which injustice may 
drive a kindly, liberty-loving people who are forced 
into cruelty by the logic of events. Having taken 
the wrong road, like Bunyan's Pilgrim, the Cava- 
liers found the rocks ready to fall on them if they 
went forward, and the gulf yawning behind them 
if they tried to turn back. 

It must never be forgotten in their behalf that 
they did try to turn about, when they saw their 
error. Their best men, over and over again, urged 
176 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

the prohibiting of slavery, and there is more than 
a probability that they would have won their 
cause, but for the attitude of that country whose 
air was afterward pronounced too pure to be 
breathed by a slave insomuch that his shackles 
fell off, when he touched the shore sacred to lib- 
erty. Yet, in 1695, this highly moral and philan- 
thropic England declared in a statute, the opinion 
of its king and Parliament, that the slave-trade 
was highly beneficial to the kingdom and colonies. 
In 17 1 2, Queen Anne boasted in her speech to Par- 
liament, of her success in securing to England a 
new market for slaves in Spanish America. Jeffer- 
son testified that Virginia was constantly balked 
in her efforts to throw off slavery by the attitude 
of the home government. Carolina attempted re- 
striction and gained a rebuke. In 1775, the Earl 
of Dartmouth haughtily replied to a colonial agent, 
"We cannot allow the colonies to check, or dis- 
courage in any degree, a traffic so beneficial to the 
nation." 

Yet all the blame cannot be thrown on Eng- 
land. Had the colonies been as firm in defence of 
their duties, as they were when their rights were 
in question, England must have yielded. Vir- 
ginia was the first State to enunciate the proposi- 
tion of the equality of man, yet was blind to her 
own inconsistency. The leading supporters of 

177 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

the cause of liberty were themselves slave-owners. 
George Washington owned negroes. John Ran- 
dolph had a bunk for his slave side by side with 
the bed of his pet horse. Patrick Henry wrote 
with admirable candor : " Believe me, I shall honor 
the Quakers for their noble efforts to abolish sla- 
very ; they are equally calculated to promote moral 
and political good. Would any one believe that 
I am master of slaves of my own purchase? I am 
drawn along by the general inconvenience of liv- 
ing without them. I will not — I can not — justify 
it." The great Southern statesman said that he 
trembled for his country when he remembered 
that God was just. Washington deplored the 
system, yet so closely were all commercial and 
political interests interwoven with it that it 
seemed impossible to disentangle them. Even 
philanthropy did not scorn its alliance. White- 
field expended the money raised by his eloquent 
preaching at Charleston, on a plantation with 
slaves to work it for the benefit of an orphan 
asylum. 

The Church spread its surplice of protection 
over the institution. Baptism was permitted to 
the slave, but with the distinct understanding that 
it was to make no difference in the condition of 
bondage of these brothers in Christ. One South 
Carolina clergyman ventured to preach on the 
178 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

duties of masters to their servants, but his con- 
gregation said to him : " Sir, we pay you a gen- 
teel salary to read to us the prayers of the 
liturgy and to explain to us such parts of the 
Gospel as the rule of the Church directs, but we 
do not want you to teach us what to do with our 
blacks." 

The Northern colonies were freed from the curse 
of slaveholding as much by policy as by principle. 
They tried slave-owning, but, happily for them, it 
did not pay. The climate and the conditions of 
their industries forbade its spread among them. 
But their hands were not unstained. If they did 
not buy slaves, they sold them. There still exists, 
if Bishop Meade may be trusted, a bill of sale 
of a slave, bearing the signature of Jonathan 
Edwards. 

Every year ships were fitted out from Medford, 
Salem, or New Bedford, which sailed away loaded 
with rum to be exchanged in Africa for negroes, 
who in turn were sold for molasses, to be made 
into rum again. The transactions of one of these 
slavers are preserved in the History of Medford, 
and makes interesting reading for those who would 
hold up the Puritan as innocent of the transgres- 
sion which stains the character of the Cavalier. 
The deadly parallel column tells its story, so 
that he who runs may read : 

179 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 



Dr. The Natives of Annamboe. 


Per Contra. Cr. 


1770. Gals 


1770 Gals 




Apr. 22. 
By 1 "Woman Slave no 


Apr. 22. To 1 hh. of rum no 




May 1. 


May 1. " " " 130 


By 1 Prime Woman Slave. 130 




May 2. 


May 2. " " " 105 


By 1 Boy Slave 4 ft. 1 in 105 




May 7. 


May 7. " " " 130 


By 1 Boy Slave 4 ft. 3 in 108 




May 5. 


May 5. Cash in gold 50Z... s 


1 Prime Man Slave 5 oz 2 

May 5. 
1 Old Man for a Lingister. . . 3 oz 


" 5- " " " 2 oz. 1 

" 5. 2 doz. of snuff 1 oz. ( 3 





The negroes thus brought to the American col- 
onies were not of one race. A slaver often carried 
men of different languages, habits, and character- 
istics, perhaps hereditary enemies. Some were 
jet black, some mahogany-colored, and others still 
of a tawny yellow, with flat noses and projecting 
jaws. This last type belonged to the low, swampy 
ground at the Niger's delta, and marked the race 
most adapted to the cultivation of the rice in its 
swamps, so fatal to white laborers. All this diver- 
sity among the negroes accounts for their lack of 
power and energy to combine in a struggle for free- 
dom. " The negroes that have^been slaves in their 
own country," Hugh Jones says, "make the best 
servants ; for they that have been kings and great 
men there, are generally lazy, haughty and ob- 
stinate." Alas, for these poor magnates from 
Heathendom! 

180 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

The Cavaliers did not find the problem of do- 
mestic service solved by life-ownership of servants. 
Colonel Fitzhugh writes Mr. John Buckner in 1680: 
" I hope you will make an abatement for your 
Dumb Negro that you sold me. Had she been a 
new Negro, I must have blamed my fate, not you ; 
but one that you had two years, I must conclude 
you knew her qualities, which is bad at work, worse 
at talking. You took advantage of the softness of 
my messenger to quit your hands of her." 

In spite of this unsuccessful experiment, we 
find him two years later making another ven- 
ture in human live-stock, by ordering John 
Withers to buy "Mr. Walton's Boy for ^20, or 
^"54 with him and 2 others, unlesse you can make 
a better bargain. " Poor Colonel Fitzhugh might 
well be discouraged, for he had tried every kind 
of servant, black and white, bond and free, with- 
out satisfactory results. "I would have you," he 
writes in despair to a sea captain in England, 
" bring me in a good housewife. I do not intend 
or mean to be brought in, as the ordinary servants 
are, but to pay her passage and agree to give her 
fifty shillings or three pounds a year during the 
space of five years, upon which terms, I suppose, 
good servants may be had, because they have their 
passage clear, and as much money as they can 
have there. / would have a good one or none. I look 

181 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

upon the generality of wenches you bring in as 
not worth keeping." 

So the Colonial Cavaliers found trouble in their 
households with servants of any race or color, and 
the gentle nature of the blacks proving specially 
adaptable to servitude, and purchase money seem- 
ing so much less than wage-money, they gradually 
did away with other service. Every plantation 
had its negro-quarters, where crowds of picka- 
ninnies swarmed in the sunshine outside the little 
cabins with scarcely more clothing on than their 
parents had worn in their African jungle. The 
bread of Indian corn was baked on the hoe over 
a smoky fire, or in the ashes. When the day's 
work was done, the negroes sat, with their banjos 
or rude musical instruments, playing accompani- 
ments to their strange, weird music, a mixture of 
reminiscences of barbarism and the hymns they 
caught from the " New Lights"; or they spent the 
evening more merrily, dancing jigs to the twang- 
ing of a broken fiddle. They were, on the whole, 
a careless, happy race, taking no thought for the 
morrow, content to accept food and clothing at the 
hands of " Massa and Missus," and, for the rest, to 
work when they must, shirk when they could, and 
carry a merry heart through life. The outward 
circumstances of their lot were hard. Anbury, in 
his American travels, observed their condition 

182 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

closely and described it with what we must be- 
lieve impartial accuracy. The life of these field- 
hands was much more severe than that of the 
household servants, both because the work itself 
was harder, and because it was ruled by the over- 
seer, usually a brute. It is of these field negroes 
that Anbury is writing, when he says : " They are 
called up at daybreak, and seldom allowed to 
swallow a mouthful of hominy or hoecake, but 
are driven out into the field immediately, where 
they continue at hard labor without intermission 
till noon, when they go to their dinners and are 
seldom allowed an hour for that purpose. Their 
meals consist of hominy and salt, and if their 
master is a man of humanity, touched by the finer 
feelings of love and sensibility, he allows them 
twice a week a little fat, skimmed milk, rusty 
bacon or salt herring to relish this miserable and 
scanty fare. .... After they have dined they re- 
turn to labor in the field till dusk in the evening. 
Here one naturally imagines the daily labor of 
these poor creatures over ; not so. They repair to 
the tobacco-houses, where each has a task of strip- 
ping allotted, which takes up some hours; or else 
they have such a quantity of Indian corn to husk, 
and if they neglect it, are tied up in the morning, 
and receive a number of lashes from those unfeel- 
ing monsters, the overseers. When they lay them- 

183 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

selves down to rest, their comforts are equally 
miserable and limited, for they sleep on a bench, 
or on the ground with an old scanty blanket, which 
serves them at once for bed and covering. Their 
clothing is not less wretched, consisting of a shirt 
and trousers of coarse, thin, hard, hempen stuff 
in the Summer, with an addition of a very coarse 
woolen jacket, breeches, and shoes in Winter." 
Yet, in spite of toil and privation, these negroes, 
so the traveller testifies, are jovial and contented. 

It seems incomprehensible to us that the noble, 
sensitive, kindly Southern gentleman saw all 
these things in silence ; that even when they had 
no share in the beating of the wayfarer, they still 
passed by on the other side with the priest or the 
Levite and offered no succor. Yet, do we not do 
the same thing every day? We know that the faces 
of the poor are ground while the rich prosper, that 
the animal world is abused and tortured, yet be- 
cause we think ourselves powerless, we strive to 
make ourselves callous, and turn away our eyes 
that we may not see where we cannot help. 

Many there were who had the courage as well 
as the impulse to protest. One of the firmest and 
the ablest of these was Jefferson. He had the 
insight to perceive not only the injustice to the 
slave, but the injury to the slaveholder. " There 
must, doubtless," he writes, "be an unhappy in- 
184 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

fluence on the manners of our people by the exist- 
ence of slavery among us. The whole commerce 
between master and slave is a perpetual exercise 
of the most boisterous passions, the most unre- 
mitting despotism on the one part, and degrading 
submission on the other. Our children see this 
and learn to imitate it, for man is an imitative 
animal. This quality is the germ of all education 
in him. From his cradle to his grave, he is learn- 
ing to do what he sees others do. If a parent 
could find no motive either in his philanthropy or 
his self-love for restraining the intemperance of 
passion toward his slave, it should always be a 
sufficient one that his child is present. But gen- 
erally it is not sufficient. The parent storms ; the 
child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, 
puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller 
slaves, gives a loose to the worst of his passions ; 
and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in 
tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious 
peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who 
can retain his manners and morals undepraved by 
such circumstances." 

Yet we are constantly meeting such prodigies 
in the history of the Cavalier. Men whose pure 
lives, gentle manners, and courtesy to high and 
low, whose unselfishness and cheerful benignity 
may be matched against those of the hardest- 
185 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

working Puritan or the most radical upholder of 
the equal rights of man. The old noblesse oblige 
principle still held sway. Governor Gouch, of 
Virginia, being once on a time reproached for hav- 
ing returned the bow of a negro, replied in the 
good old Cavalier spirit : " I should be much 
ashamed that a negro should have better manners 
than I." The field hands were kept at a distance, 
but the house-servants were admitted to the 
closest intimacy, especially when acting in the 
capacity of maids and nurses. Many a golden 
head was laid for comfort on the black breast of 
some faithful Mammy, while the childish sorrows 
were poured into her listening ear, and many a 
gray-haired woman recalled as her truest friend, 
the humble slave whose life had been devoted to 
her service. 

An entry in Washington's journal shows how 
well he understood the nature of the negro, and 
how wisely and firmly he dealt with it. One day 
four of his servants were employed at carpenter- 
ing, but without accomplishing anything. Instead 
of scolding, Washington sat himself calmly down 
to watch their work. Stimulated by his presence, 
they went on briskly. The wise master noted the 
work and the time, and then informed them that 
just so much must be done in his absence. It was 
owing to such management that the products of 
186 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

the Mount Vernon plantation ranked so high that 
all barrels marked with the name of George Wash- 
ington passed the inspectors without examination. 
Here, if anywhere, was a man who might be 
trusted with arbitrary power over his fellow-men, 
yet he was one of the most outspoken in opposi- 
tion to slavery; and he, like Jefferson, realized the 
terrible strain on the character of the master. 
Woe to the man who lives constantly with in- 
feriors! He is doomed never to hear himself con- 
tradicted, never to be told unwelcome truth, never 
to sharpen his wits and learn to control his temper 
by argument with equals. The Colonial Cavaliers 
were little kings, and they proved the truth of the 
saying of the royal sage of Rome, that the most 
difficult of tasks is to lead life well in a palace. 

187 



His Church 



His Church 




IDillMtilburg 



6 * fyTZATi? not holy thinges with profane ! " so runs 
1 1 the inscription on the quaint old silver 
chalice used in the communion service of the 
Jamestown church. 

Had the advice been heeded, the history of the 
Colonial Church of England would not have been 
the sorry story it is. In point of fact, holy and 
profane things are so mixed in its chronicles that 
it is hard to write of it without seeming levity 
and flippancy. To call the differences between 
191 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

the parsons and their parishes in the Southern 
Colonies a struggle, would be to dignify it beyond 
the warrant of truth. It was simply a series of 
squabbles without ennobling principle on either 
side. Yet, in the beginning, better things prom- 
ised. Great attention was paid to religious forms 
and observances, and the earliest laws are devoted 
to the regulation of church affairs. 

In the year after the landing of the settlers, 
Edward Maria Wingfield, first president of 
the council in Virginia, was brought to trial ac- 
cused of various high crimes and misdemeanors. 
Among the charges against him was one of athe- 
ism. The most damaging evidence against him 
was the absence of a Bible from his belongings. 
He himself felt that this was a point needing ex- 
planation, which he made by saying that he had 
" sorted" many books to take with him to Virginia, 
and was sure that a Bible was among them, but 
that in the course of his journey he had found " the 
truncke" somehow broken open, and the Bible 
"ymbeasiled." 

In rebuttal of evidence showing general god- 
lessness and lack of respect for the Sabbath, he 
explained that on the Sunday in question, Indian 
allarums had detained every one at the palisade 
"till the daie was farre spent." Then, he goes 
on to say : " the preacher, Master Hunt, did aske 
192 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

me if it weare my pleasure to have a sermon. He 
said he was prepared for it. I made answer that 
our men were weary and hungry, and that if it 
pleased him wee would spare him till some other 
tyme." 

The tact of this reply should certainly have 
scored a point in Wingfield's defence, especially 
as he adds : " I never failed to take such noates by 
wrighting out of his doctrine as my capacity could 
comprehend, unless some raynie day hindered my en- 
deavour •." 

These excuses, however, were not satisfactory 
to his judges, and the other charges against him 
proving only too well-founded, he was deposed 
from the council, and was glad enough to slip off 
back to England at the first chance. Three years 
later, Dale of the iron hand came over fresh from 
the Netherlands, and put religion, like everything 
else, under martial law. The captain of the watch 
was made a sort of tithing-man, whose business it 
was to preserve order and encourage godliness at 
the point of the bayonet. It was his duty, half 
an hour before divine service, morning and even- 
ing, to shut the ports and place sentinels, and, the 
bell having tolled for the last time, to search all 
the houses, and to command every one (with the 
exception of the sick and hurt) to go to church. 
This done, he followed the guards with their arms 
193 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

into the church, where he laid the keys before 
the governor. On Sunday he was ordered to see 
that the day was noways profaned by any dis- 
orders. 

The Ancient Planters were strict Sunday keep- 
ers. The earliest law decrees " The Sabbath 
to be kept holy, that no journeys be made except 
in case of emergent necessitie on that day, that no 
goods bee laden in boates, nor shooteing in gunns 
or the like tending to the prophanation of the 
day." The offender who disobeys this decree is 
sentenced to pay a fine of a hundred pounds of 
tobacco or "be layd in the stocks." 

Henry Coleman was excommunicated for forty 
days for scornful speeches, and putting on his 
hat in church. The minister as well as the 
church was protected by law from irreverence and 
disrespect. In 1653, it was ordered by the court 
that, for slandering Rev. Mr. Cotton, " Henry 
Charlton make a pair of stocks and set in them 
several Sabbath-days during divine service, and 
then ask Mr. Cotton's forgiveness for using offen- 
sive and slanderous words concerning him." A 
few years later, Mary Powell, for slandering a 
minister, was sentenced to receive twenty lashes 
on her bare shoulders, and to be banished the 
country. I tremble to think what would have 
been the fate, had he fallen into episcopal hands, 
194 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

of the Puritan who spoke of bishops as "proud, 
popish, presumptuous, paltry, pestilent, and per- 
nicious prelates;" and further as "impudent, 
shameless, and wainscot-faced." I, for one, should 
have voted to take something from his punishment, 
on the ground of his supplying the world with a 
new and most expressive phrase. 

Maryland, liberal in all sectarian matters, 
strictly forbade calling names such as " Heretick, 
Schismatick, Idolator, Papist, Antinomian, etc.," 
and sentenced the offender to a fine of ten shil- 
lings. She also dealt summarily with unbelievers. 
Her assembly ordained that " whatsoever person or 
persons shall deny the Holy Trinity, or shall utter 
reproachful speeches concerning the Trinity or 
any of the said persons thereof, shall be punished 
with death and confiscation of land and goods to 
the Lord Proprietary." 

The first church in America was a very simple 
affair, an old rotten tent set up in the Jamestown 
marsh under the pines and hemlocks. The soft 
May weather made even so much shelter unneces- 
sary, and it was replaced by an awning stretched 
between the rustling boughs. But busy as the 
settlers were, they set to work at once on a chapel 
built of logs and covered with sedge and dirt, which 
in turn was replaced by a church of timber, fifty 
feet long, by more than twenty in breadth. This 

J 95 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

finalty was replaced by the brick building whose 
ruined arches alone remain to tell its story. 

When Lord De la Warre arrived in Virginia and 
found the colonists in desperate straits, he wisely 
occupied their attention by setting them to repair 
and refurnish the wooden church then in exist- 
ence, and to decorate it with flowers. Here dur- 
ing his government he worshipped in a degree of 
state more fitting for a cathedral than for a wooden 
chapel in the wilderness. He went to church in 
full dress, attended by his lieutenant-general, ad- 
miral, vice-admiral, master of the horse and the 
rest of the council, with a guard of fifty halberd- 
bearers in red cloaks behind him. When the ser- 
vice ended, the procession filed out with as much 
solemnity as it had entered, and escorted the 
Governor to his house. 

Religious observances played an important part 
in the early days of the settlement. The first 
statute made by an early legislative assembly, 
requires that in every plantation some house or 
room be specially dedicated to the worship of God, 
sequestered and set apart for that purpose, and not 
to be of any temporal use whatever. 

It is curious, in view of this last clause, to find it 
recorded of the House of Burgesses itself : "The 
most convenient place wee could finde to site in 
was the quire of the churche. " Surely no place 

196 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

could have been more appropriate for the gathering 
of the first free assembly of the people in America, 
and it was equally fitting that their proceedings 
should open with a prayer for guidance in the path 
which was destined to be darker and more difficult 
than they knew. " Forasmuch as men's affaires doe 
little prosper when God's service is neglected," a 
prayer was said by Mr. Bucke, the minister, " that 
it would please God to guide and sanctifie all our 
proceedings to His owne glory and the good of this 
Plantation." 

If the church of that time was devoted to tem- 
poral uses, religious services were not confined 
within its walls. Alexander Whitaker, the apos- 
tle of Virginia, writes home that he exercises at 
the house of the governor, Sir Thomas Dale, every 
Saturday night. This "exercising," or hearing 
of the catechism, with prayer and song, in private 
houses, was a matter of necessity in days when a 
parish covered a space hardly to be crossed in a 
day's journey, with the roads or bridle-paths choked 
with undergrowth, and blocked by fallen logs. 
The Rev. Mr. Forbes seems to have been of a com- 
plaining nature, yet he rouses one's sympathy 
when he tells of the difficulties under which he 
labored. 

"My parish," he says, "extendeth LX miles in 
length, in breadth about XI." Over this distance 

197 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

were scattered some four hundred families, to 
whom he was expected to minister. " Sometimes, " 
he goes on plaintively, " after I have travelled Fifty 
Miles to Preach at a Private House, the weather 
happening to prove bad on the day of our meeting 
so that very few met, or else being hindred by 
Rivers and Swamps rendred impassable with 
much rain, I have returned with doing of nothing 
to their benefit or mine own satisfaction." 

Few clergymen of that day and region took their 
duties so seriously. They were for the most part 
quite willing to have service read by some deputy- 
priest or layman in the "chapels of ease;" or if 
they must officiate, they chose some sermon from 
Thomas Fuller or Jeremy Taylor, or, as a last re- 
sort, constructed one at small expense of labor on a 
scaffolding of headings resting on an underpinning 
of text. A fine example of this method of sermon- 
building I find in the discourse sent home by the 
pious Whitaker. He takes as his text, " Cast thy 
bread upon the waters," and expounds it after 
this fashion : 

" i. The dutie to be performed: Cast thy bread. 
Be liberal to all. 

" 2. The manner of bestowing alms: By casting 
it away. 

"3. What is to be given? Bread; all things 
needful, yes, and of the best kind. 
198 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

" 4. Who may be liberal? Even those that have 
it. It must be thy bread — thine own. 

"5. To whom we must be liberal : To all; yea 
to the Waters." 

This kind of sermon had the double advantage 
of being easy for the preacher, and restful to the 
congregation. It went along at a comfortable 
jog-trot, like a family horse, and the hearer was in 
no danger of being hurled over the head of revival 
eloquence into lurid threats of future punishment. 
If the preachers of the Church of England did not 
kindle spiritual ardor, at least they did not keep 
children awake o' nights, nor frighten nervous 
women into hysterics. 

While these drowsy discourses were going on in 
the Southern colonies, the Puritan divine in the 
New England pulpit was throwing off such cheer- 
ful observations as these : " Every natural man and 
woman is born full of all sin, as full as a toad is 
of poison, as full as ever his skin can hold ; mind, 
will, eyes, mouth ; every limb of his body and 
every piece of his mind." The future awaiting 
such a wretch, he sets forth vividly : " Thou canst 
not endure the torments of a little kitchen-fire on 
the tip of thy finger, not one-half hour together. 
How wilt thou bear the fury of this infinite, end- 
less, consuming fire in body and soul !" To these 
inspiring doctrines of the Rev. Thomas Shepherd, 

199 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

another Puritan preacher added his conviction that 
"there are infants in hell not a span long." 

To the credit of the Colonial Church of England 
be it recorded that no such sentiments disgraced its 
pulpit and made its Sabbath terrible to little 
children. The day was one of innocent enjoy- 
ment, and the church building was dear to gener- 
ation after generation, as a peaceful and memory- 
hallowed spot. The early settlers had little money 
to spend in adorning their churches, yet from the 
beginning there was a great difference between the 
bare and square wooden New England meeting- 
house and the quaint Southern church of brick or 
stone, recalling in every line the beloved parish 
churches of Old England. The churchmen, un- 
like the Puritans, found no sin in beauty or adorn- 
ment. St. John's Church at Hampton bore the 
royal arms carved on its steeple. Colonel Spring- 
er left by his will one thousand pounds of 
tobacco to pay for having the Lord's Prayer and 
Commandments put up in the new church at 
Northampton. By a statute of 1660, parishes are 
enjoined to provide at their own cost a great church 
Bible and two books of Common Prayer in folio 
for the minister and " dark" ; also communion- 
plate, pulpit-cloth, and cushion, " that all things 
may be done orderly and decently in the church. " 
In the next century, there is a record of an or- 
200 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER 





der sent to England for gold- 
leaf to enrich a chan- 
cel, which was to be 
made gorgeous with an 
original painting of an 
angel holding back a crimson 
curtain, draped with a golden 
cord and tassel. 

The pulpits in the old 
churches were placed at an an- 
gle, if the church were in the 
form of a cross; or if the build- 
ing were an oblong, on one side. 
These pulpits were so high that, 
unless the preacher were very 
tall, nothing could be seen by 
the congregation but the top of 
his head. Bishop Meade con- 
fesses that 
when he was 
to speak from 
one of these 
old box-pul- 
pits, he would 
often hurry 
to church be- 
fore his hear- 
ers, in order 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

to pile up bricks or boards on which to stand. 
The good bishop must sometimes have found his 
thoughts sadly distracted from the sermon by the 
necessity of keeping his balance on his improvised 
platform. 

The sharp distinction of classes, which was so 
marked a feature of the Cavalier Colonies, showed 
itself even in church. Certain pews were set apart 
and marked " Magistrates" and " Magistrates' 
Ladies." Into these the great folks marched sol- 
emnly on Sundays, followed by their slaves bearing 
prayer-books, and never suspecting that their con- 
duct was at variance with gospel principles. The 
great families kept their private pews for gener- 
ations, and held firmly to their privileges. Mat- 
thew Kemp, as churchwarden, was commended 
by his vestry for displacing " a presuming woman, 
who would fain have taken a pew above her de- 
gree. " In the very earliest church, Lord De la 
Warre's seat was upholstered in green velvet with 
a green "cooshoon;" Governor Spotswood's pew 
in Bruton Parish Church at Williamsburg was 
raised from the floor, and covered with a canopy, 
while the interior was ornamented with his name 
in gilt letters. In 1750, it was ordered by the 
vestry of St. Paul's Church, Norfolk, that "three 
captains and Mr. Charles- Sweeny be allowed to 
build a gallery reaching from the gallery of Mr. 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

John Taylor to the school-boys' gallery, to be theirs 
and their heirs' forever." 

Washington's pew was an ample square, fitted 
with cushions for sitting and kneeling. The 
Puritans would have thought it a glaring iniquity 
to pay such heed to creature comfort in the house 
of God. They would have been more in sympa- 
thy with the Virginia dame of high degree who, 
in tardy atonement for her pride, directed that her 
body be buried under the pavement in the aisle 
occupied by the poor of the church, that they 
might trample on her dust. Such gloomy and 
ascetic associations with the house of God were 
rare at the South. The church was a centre of 
cheerfulness, and the Sabbath was supposed to be 
a day of innocent enjoyment. All work was 
frowned upon as inconsistent with a due observ- 
ance of its sanctity, however; and the Grand 
Jury in Middlesex County, Virginia, in 1704, pre- 
sented Thomas Simms, for travelling on the road 
on Sunday with a loaded beast, William Mon- 
tague and Garrett Minor for bringing oysters 
ashore on the Sabbath, James Senis for swear- 
ing and cursing on the holy day; but outside 
such restrictions as these, no Blue Laws en- 
forced gloom as part of the decorum of Sunday- 
keeping. 

When the church-bell, hung usually from the 
203 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

bough of a tree, began to ring for service, the 
roads were filled with worshippers moving church- 
ward, full of peace and good-will. First might be 
seen the young men on horseback, with the tails 
of their coats carefully pinned in front, to protect 
them from the sweat of their horses' flanks. Lum- 
bering slowly after these equestrians came the 
great family-coaches, from which the ladies are 
assisted by the dismounted gallants. Every 
young damsel is planning some social festivity. 
Before or after service, invitations are given, and 
visits of weeks in length are arranged at the 
church door. It is to be feared that these colo- 
nial maidens sometimes allow their thoughts to 
wander in sermon-time, from their quaint little 
prayer-books, with their uneven type and crooked 
f's, and that they are thinking of dinners while 
they confess themselves sinners. But their levity 
is not treated severely by the priest, for he is as 
eager for his Madeira as his young parishioners 
are eager for their minuet. 

They were jolly dogs, those colonial clergymen 
of the Church of England in the eighteenth cen- 
tury, and no more to be taken seriously than Friar 
Tuck, whose apostolic successors they were. Par- 
ishioners who wished spiritual counsel had 
difficulty in finding the parson. In the morning 
he was fox-hunting, in the afternoon he was over 
204 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

(or under) the dining-table, and the midnight can- 
dle shone on his wine-cup and dice-box. 

Like their brethren across the Altantic, the 
colonial clergy were strong on doctrine. " They 
abhorred popery, atheism, and idolatries in gen- 
eral, and hiccupped 'Church and State!' with fer- 
vor." Yet their morals were at so low an ebb as 
to justify the complaint made against them that 
they were " such as wore black coats and could 
gabble in a pulpit, roar in a tavern, exact from 
their parishioners, and rather by their dissolute- 
ness destroy than feed their flock." 

One clergyman assaulted a dignitary in vestry- 
meeting, pulling off his wig and subjecting him 
to various indignities, and capped the climax of 
audacity by preaching the next Sunday from the 
text : " I contended with them and cursed them, 
and smote certain of them and pulled off their 
hair." Another minister fought a duel behind 
his church, and a third, the Rev. Thomas Blewer 
(pronounced probably Blower), was presented by 
the Grand Jury as a common swearer. All ef- 
forts to reform the clergy were in vain. Ministers 
were sometimes tried for drunkenness, and some 
of the tests of what constitutes drunkenness were 
laid down by the court : " Sitting an hour or longer 
in the company where they are drinking strong 
drink and in the mean time drinking of healths, 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

or otherwise taking the cups as they come round, 
like the rest of the company ; striking or challeng- 
ing or threatening to fight." Staggering, reeling, 
and incoherent speech are justly regarded as sus- 
picious circumstances, and the advice continues: 
" Let the proof of these signs proceed so far till 
the judges conclude that behavior at such time 
was scandalous, undecent, unbecoming the dig- 
nity of a minister." There is unfortunately only 
too clear a case against the colonial clergy ; but it 
is only fair to take into account the condition of 
the church at home. If the clergymen in Mary- 
land and Virginia gambled and drank, so did those 
in England and Wales. Did not Sterne grace the 
cassock? Did not Gay propose taking orders for 
a living, and did not Swift write from a deanery 
stuff too vile for print? There was some talk at 
one time of sending this great Dr. Swift over to 
Virginia as a bishop, and a worthy one he would 
have been, to such a church. 

The eighteenth century was a period of deca- 
dence in the colonial ministry. Things had not al- 
ways been so bad. When the first settlers came to 
America, the clergymen who accompanied them 
were men of sterling worth and character. They 
were moved by a hope of converting the Indians, 
and came in a true missionary spirit. The jour- 
nals of those adventurers testify to the courage 
206 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

with which their chaplain braved dangers and 
bore discomforts. " Ity unprosperous winds, " they 
say, " we were kept six weeks in sight of Eng- 
land ; all which time Master Hunt, our preacher, 
was so weake and sicke that few expected his re- 
covery. Yet, although we were but twentie myles 
from his habitation, and notwithstanding the 
stormy weather, nor the scandalous imputations 
against him, all this could never force from him 
so much as a seeming desire to leave the businesse. " 
All through the journey he was brave and cheer- 
ful, though there was a constant ferment of wrath 
in that hot-headed ship's company, which might 
have ended in bloodshed, "had he not, with the 
water of patience and his godly exhortations, but 
chiefly by. his true, devoted example, quenched 
those flames of envy and detraction." Finally, 
after the fire at Jamestown, Master Hunt lost all 
his library and " all he had but the cloathes on 
his backe, yet none never heard him repine at his 
loss." 

Following Hunt came the good Whitaker, " a 
schollar, a graduate, a preacher well born and 
well friended in England, " who from conscientious 
desire to help the savages left " his warm nest and, 
to the wonder of his kinsmen, and to the amaze- 
ment of them that knew him," undertook this per- 
ilous enterprise. Of such pith and worth were 

207 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

these first priests; but the Indian massacre made 
a great change. Friendly intercourse with the 
natives being cut off, there was no chance for mis- 
sionary work among them, and the plantations were 
too far apart to make a vigorous church life possible. 
The pay was small and the field barren, so that 
there was little temptation either to the ambi- 
tious and intellectual, or to the spiritually minded 
class of the clergy, to come to America. They were 
as a rule, therefore, the ignorant, the dissipated, 
and the mauvais sujets who filled the colonial livings. 
Yet at the lowest ebb there were exceptions to 
this rule. There, for instance, was Rector Robert 
Rose, whose tombstone describes him as discharg- 
ing with the most tender piety the " domestick" 
duties of husband, father, son, and brother, and in 
short as " a friend to the whole human race. " His 
journal gives a glimpse of his relations with his 
parish, very cheering in the dreary waste of 
quarrels and bickering so common in those days. 
On one occasion, during a drouth, when a famine 
threatened, he told his people that corn could be 
had from him. On the appointed day a crowd 
gathered before his house. He asked the appli- 
cants if they had brought money to pay for the 
corn. Some answered cheerfully, "Yes," others 
murmured disconsolately, " No. " The good priest 
then said: "You who have money can get your 
208 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

corn anywhere, but these poor fellows with no 
money shall have my corn." 

He was quite human, this old parson, and liked 
his glass of " Fyal" or Madeira, but he knew when 
to stop, and he feared not to rebuke the rich and 
great among his parishioners when he saw them 
making too merry. He enters in his journal the 
date of a call on one of his leading families, when 
he found the father absent at a cock-fight. The 
rector adds the significant memorandum : " Suffer 
it no more!" 

In spite of a few bright exceptions like this, it 
is idle to deny that the relations between parish 
and clergy in the Southern church ill bore com- 
parison with those of the Puritan and his min- 
ister; and this not because of doctrine, but chiefly 
because the Puritan minister represented the free 
choice of the people, who supported him will- 
ingly, and looked upon him with reverence, 
as the messenger of the Lord. In South Carolina, 
where the clergy were chosen by the vestries, the 
same harmony and good-will existed, but the 
church in Virginia writhed under the injustice of 
taxation without representation. 

The parishioners were expected to receive and 

maintain the clergyman appointed them without 

criticism or question. How any attempt on the part 

of these vestries to discipline or dismiss the min- 

209 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

ister they supported was received, we may judge 
fiom this letter, sent by Governor Spotswood to 
the churchwardens and vestry of South Farnham 
parish in 17 16: 

"Gentlemen: I'm not a little surprised at the 
sight of an order of yours, wherein you take upon 
you to suspend from his office a clergyman who 
for near sixteen years has served as your minister. 
... As no vestry in England has ever pretended 
to set themselves up as judges over their minis- 
ters, so I know no law of this country that has 
given such authority to the vestry here. If a 
clergyman transgresses against the canons of the 
church, he is to be tried before a proper judica- 
ture, and though in this country there be no bish- 
ops to apply to, yet there is a substitute for a bishop 
in your diocesan. ... In case of the misbehavior 
of your clergyman, you may be his accusers, but 
in no case his judges; but much less are you em- 
powered to turn him out without showing cause." 

This haughty language recalls the messages of 
Charles the First to his parliament. Yet in spite 
of his support of the priest against the parish, the 
Governor never dreamed of recognizing him as his 
own equal. Some years later, when the stately old 
aristocrat was in his grave, a member of the clergy 
sued for the hand of his widow, Lady Spotswood. 
The reverend suitor writes after a very humble 
210 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

and apologetic fashion : " Madam," he begins, " by 
diligently perusing your letter I perceive there 
is a material argument — upon which your strong- 
est objection against completing my happiness 
would seem to depend, viz. : That you would in- 
cur ye censure of ye world for marrying a person 
in ye station of my station and character. By 
which I understand that you think it a diminution 
of your honour and ye dignity of your family to 
marry a person in ye station of a clergyman. Now, 
if I can make it appear that ye ministerial office 
is an employment in its nature ye most honorable 
and in its effects ye most beneficial to mankind, I 
hope your objections will immediately vanish — 
that you will keep me no longer in suspense and 
misery, but consummate my happiness." After a 
long enumeration of the dignities, spiritual rather 
than social, appertaining to the clergy, he closes 
thus: "And, therefore, if a gentleman of this sa- 
cred and honourable character should be married 
to a lady, though of ye greatest extraction and 
most excellent personal qualities (which I am sen- 
sible you are endowed with), it can be no disgrace 
to her or her family ; nor draw the censures of ye 
world upon them for such an action." Such lan- 
guage is in curious contrast with the attitude of 
New England, where the praise bestowed on a 
woman by Cotton Mather as the highest possible 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

compliment was, that she was worthy to be the 
wife of a priest. 

The chief cause of irritation between parson and 
parish in the colonial church was from the be- 
ginning the question of the ministers' salaries. 
In some places these were very small. It appears, 
for instance, in the record book of the church at 
Edenton, in North Carolina, that Parson Garzia in 
the year 1736, was paid only ^5 for holding divine 
service. But in Maryland and Virginia the salaries 
were frequently higher than those paid in New 
England. In each Virginia borough a hundred 
acres were set off as a glebe, or parsonage farm. 
Besides this and the salary, there were fees of 
twenty shillings for a wedding by license and five 
shillings for every wedding by banns, beside forty 
shillings for a funeral sermon. It is easier to un- 
derstand the fulsomeness of these old funeral 
discourses when we learn how well they were paid 
for, and realize that, in common honesty, the min- 
ister was bound to render a forty-shilling certifi- 
cate of character to the deceased. 

As time went on, the salary question became a 
burning issue. The plantations being so widely 
separated, quarrels often arose as to the portion 
of the parish on which the chief burden of the 
minister's support should fall. In the records 
of the very early Virginia church history, we 
212 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

come upon an instance of this in the proceedings 
in Lower Norfolk County, at a court held 25th 
May, 1640. 

" Whereas the inhabitants of this parrishe beinge 
this day conevented for the providinge of them- 
selves an able minister to instruct them concern- 
ing their soules' health, mr. Thomas Harrison 
tharto hath tendered his service to god and the said 
inhabitants in that behalf wch his said tender is 
well liked of, with the genall approbacon of the 
said Inhabitants, the parishoners of the parishe 
church at mr. Sewell's Point who to testifie their 
zeale and willingness to p'mote gods service doe 
hereby p'mise (and the court now sittinge doth 
likewise order and establish the same) to pay one 
hundreth pounds starling yearely to the sd mr. 
Harrison, soe Longe as'hee shall continue a min- 
ister to the said Parishe in recompence of his 
paynes." 

This arrangement apparently did not long prove 
satisfactory, for the record goes on to state that 

"Whereas there is a difference amongst the 
Inhabitants of the fforesaid Pishe, concerninge 
the imployinge of a minister beinge now enter- 
tayned to live amongst them, The Inhabitants 
from Danyell Tanner's Creek and upward the three 
branches of Elizabeth river (in respect they are 
the greatest number of tithable persons) not 

213 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

thinknge it fitt nor equall that they shall pay the 
greatest pte of one hundred pownds w h is by the 
ffore sd order allotted for the ministers annuall 
stipend, unlesse the sd minister may teach and 
Instruct them as often as he shall teach at ye 
Pishe church siytuate at mr. Sewell's Pointe. It 
is therefore agreed amongst the sd Inhabitants 
that the sd minister shall teach evie other Sunday 
amongst the Inhabitants of Elizabeth River at the 
house of Robert Glasscocke untill a convenyent 
church be built and Erected there for gods service 
w h is agreed to bee finished at the charge of the 
Inhabitants of Elizabeth River before the first 
day of May next ensueinge." 

However little value they might set on Gospel 
privileges, these Danyell Tanner's Creek men 
meant to have what they paid for, or cease their 
payments. 

A Virginia statue of 1696 declared that each 
minister of a parish should receive an annual 
stipend of sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco. 
This amounted to about ^140, as tobacco sold 
for many years at two-pence the pound. But, in the 
year 1755, there w r as a shortage in the tobacco crop, 
and the legislature passed an act enabling the in- 
habitants of the county to discharge their tobacco- 
debts in money for the present year. The clergy 
seem to have made no active opposition ; but five 
214 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

years later, when a similar law was passed, and to- 
bacco rose sharply in price, they took alarm, and 
started a violent campaign in defence of their 
rights. The Reverend John Camm published a 
sarcastic pamphlet on "The Two Penny Act." 
This was answered by Colonel Bland and Colonel 
Carter in two very plain-spoken documents. 
Camm again rode a tilt against them in a pam- 
phlet called "The Colonels Dismounted." 

The community began by laughing, but ended 
by getting angry. Mr. Camm could find no more 
printers in Virginia, and was obliged to go to 
Maryland to carry on the war. The contest grew to 
larger proportions. It crossed the ocean and was 
laid before the king, who, always glad of an op- 
portunity to repress anything which looked like 
popular sovereignty, declared in favor of the 
clergy. Armed thus by royal approbation, the 
parsons brought their case to trial. The Rev. 
James Maury brought suit in Hanover County 
against the collector. The defendants pleaded 
the law of 1758, but the plaintiff demurred on 
the ground that that law, never having been 
confirmed by the king, was null and void. The 
case was tried, Mr. Lyons arguing for the 
plaintiff and Mr. Lewis for the defendant. The 
court sustained the demurrer, and the clergy 
looked upon their case as won. Lewis was so sure 
215 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

of it that he retired from the cause, telling his 
clients that there was nothing more to be done in 
the matter. Nothing remained but for a jury to 
fix the amount of damages. 

In this desperate state of affairs, Patrick Henry, 
though almost unknown at the bar, was called in, 
and he agreed to argue the case at the next term. 
On the first of December, accordingly, he came 
into the court-room, to find it densely packed with 
an excited throng of listeners. The bench was 
filled with clergymen. In the magistrate's seat sat 
the young orator's own father. The occasion might 
well have tried the nerve of an older and more 
experienced speaker. Lyons opened the cause 
for the clergy, with the easy assurance of one who 
sees his case already won. He told the jury that 
the law of 1758 had been set aside, and that it only 
remained for them to enforce the law of 1748 by 
awarding suitable damages to his clients, whom he 
exalted to the skies in a eulogy which might have 
better fitted better men. Lyons sat down, and 
young Henry rose. Awkwardly and falteringly 
he began, in painful contrast to the easy address 
of Lyons. The plaintiffs on the bench looked at 
each other with smiles of derision. The people, 
who realized that his cause was theirs, hung their 
heads ; but only for a moment. The young orator, 
whose timid commencement had caused winks and 
216 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

nods of satisfaction to pass along the bench of the 
clergy, suddenly changed his whole attitude. All 
at once he shook off embarrassment, and roused 
himself like a lion brought to bay. The people at 
first were cheered, then became intoxicated with 
his eloquence. The clergy listened to the flood 
of sarcasm and invective till they could bear no 
more, and fled from the bench as from a pillory. 
Henry's eloquence swept the jury, who returned 
at once with a verdict of one penny damages for the 
clergy. The people, wild with delight, seized 
their hero and carried him out on their shoulders. 
Henceforward he was a marked man, and for years, 
Wirt tells us, when the old people wished to 
praise any one's eloquence, they would say: " He 
is almost equal to Patrick when he pled against 
the parsons. " 

With so much hostile feeling toward their clergy, 
how shall we account for the strong affection felt 
by the Virginians for their church? I find the ex- 
planation in that loyalty to lost causes and that 
aristocratic conservatism which always marked 
the Cavalier. These, in spite of the debasement of 
the clergy, the zeal of the "New Lights," the al- 
lurements of Rome, and the eloquence of White- 
field, Fox, and the Wesleys, long kept the Cavalier 
Colonies true to the church of their fathers. It 
was not till the church allied itself with the king 

217 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

against the people in the Revolutionary struggle, 
that its doom fell. 

It was a matter of course that self-interest as 
well as sentiment should lead the clergy to es- 
pouse the cause of England. In a letter, dated 
1766, the Rev. John Camm writes from Virginia 
to a Mrs. McClurg in the mother-country. He 
begins, as is natural, with what is nearest his 
heart, namely his own affairs, and requests the 
lady to use her influence with Mr. Pitt to secure 
him a Living of one hundred pounds a year. 
Fearing that his request is too modest : " Observe, " 
he says, " tho' a Living of one hundred nett will 
do, I care not how much larger the Living shall 
be. If by conversing with the Great, you have 
learnt their manners, and are unwilling to bestow 
so considerable a favour on a friend without some 
way or other finding your account in the transac- 
tion, which the unpolished call a bribe, you shall 
make your own terms with me. I will submit 
to what you think reasonable, and then, you 
know, the larger the Living or Post is, the better 
for both." 

This pious worthy, having thus disposed of the 
affairs of the church, next deals in the same pub- 
lic spirited manner with the affairs of the colo- 
nial politics: 

" One of our most active, flaming and ap- 
218 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

plauded sons of liberty, Col. Rich'd Henry Lee, 
who burnt poor Mercer in effigy, raised a mob on 
Archy Ritchie, etc., etc., etc., has been lately 
blown up in the Publick Prints, it is said, by Mr. 
James Mercer. It appears that Lee, previous to 
his Patriotism, had made interest to be made 
Stamp Master himself, from letters it seems now 
in the possession of Col. Mercer, so that Lee will 
find it difficult hereafter to deceive anybody into 
an opinion of his Patriotism." 

Posterity has quite definitely settled the ques- 
tion of the comparative patriotism of Col. Lee 
and the Rev. John Camm, and only wonders that 
a shrewd people tolerated that ecclestiastical 
fraud so long. Peace to his ashes! since he and 
his fellows have given way to good and sincere 
men who have purged the church of her disgrace 
and brought her back to her older and better tra- 
ditions. 

A gentleman of the old school, in cocked hat and 
knee-breeches, once said to Madison that a man 
might be a Christian in any church, but a gentleman 
must belong to the Church of England. 
219 



His Education 



Education • 




GOVERNOR BERKELEY, that old stum- 
bling-block-head who stopped the wheels of 
progress in Virginia for fifty years, wrote to the 
English Commissioners in 1670: "I thank God 
there are no free schools nor printing; and I 
hope we shall not have , for learning hath brought 
disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, 
and printing hath divulged them, and libels 
against the best government. God keep us from 
both!" 

The bigoted Sir William set forth but too accu- 
rately the condition of affairs not only in Virignia, 
but in Maryland as well. It is impossible to avoid 
noting the striking contrast between the South and 
New England, where, by this time, every colony 
except Rhode Island had made education compul- 
sory, where the school-house and the church stood 
side by side in every village. An old New England 
statute commands that " every township, after the 

223 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIE R . 

Lord hath increased them to the number of fi'fty 
households, shall appoint one to teach all the chil- 
dren to write and read, and when any town shall 
increase to the number of a hundred families, they 
shall set up a grammar school." All the energy 
of the Puritan which was not absorbed in religion 
vented itself on education. Ambition turned its 
current to learning as more desirable than wealth. 
" Child," said a New England matron to her boy, 
"if God make thee a good Christian and a good 
scholar, thou hast all that thy mother ever asked 
for thee." 

Such a spirit bred a race of readers and students, 
trained to sift arguments and to weigh reasons. 
No such devotion to books or scholarship prevailed 
at the South. Yet when the Revolution came, 
the most thrilling eloquence, the highest states- 
manship, the greatest military genius were found 
among these Southerners. Their education had 
been different from that of the Puritans, but it had 
been an education none the less. The Cavalier 
had been trained in the school of politics, in the 
responsibilities of power, and in the traditions of 
greatness. 

The very absence of the reading habit tended 

to develop action, and the power of thinking out 

problems afresh, unhampered by the trammels of 

other men's thoughts. The haughtiness begotten 

224 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

by slave-holding made it doubly hard for the mas- 
ter to bow the knee even to a sovereign. The 
habit of command and responsibility of power, 
which shone on the battlefield and in the council- 
chamber, were learned on the lonely estates, where 
each planter was a king. Behind all these ele- 
ments of training were the ideals which moulded 
the mind and the character. 

Berkeley's taunting question to Bacon, " Have 
you forgot to be a gentleman ? " owed its sting to this 
suggestion that he had been false to the traditions 
of his class. If we hold that tact and courtesy and 
gracious hospitality are results of education, we 
must admit that the Puritans of New England 
might have learned much from their neighbors in 
Maryland and Virginia. The education of poli- 
tics, of power, of high traditions in virtue and in 
manners the Colonial Cavalier possessed. The 
education of books he lacked. Here and there, how- 
ever, we find traces of some omnivorous reader even 
in the earliest times. Books were highly valued 
and treasured by generation after generation. We 
find among the old wills that " Richard Russell 
left Richard Yates 'a booke called Lyons play,' 
'John porter junr. six books' 'John porter (i) my 
exec'r, ten books, ' 'Katherin Greene three bookes, ' 
'One book to Sarah Dyer,' 'unto Wm. Greene 
his wife two books & her mother a booke,' 'Anna 
225 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

Godby two books,' 'Jno. Abell One booke in 
Quarto,' 'Richard Lawrence One booke.'* 

*V. Library of Edmund Berkeley, Esq., Member of the 
Council (Died 15 Dec. 1718), from an inventory taken the 
18 and 19 days of June, 1719 : 

The whole Duty of Mann One old Bible and one old 
comon pray book The Christian Sacrifice The great 
Duty of frequenting the Christian Sacrifice A Brief chron- 
icle of the Civil Wars of England and Ireland. Cavalrie 
the first Book The common prayer book the best compan- 
ion. Janna Divoram. Contemplations on the State of 
Mann the first part of the English Dixtionary The Wei 
Spring of Sciences The Young Clerk guide A compen- 
dium of physick The Athenian Oracle A Guide to Con- 
stables Some consideration touching the Stile of the Holy 
Scriptures. A perfect Guide for a Studious Young Law- 
yer The p r sent State of London, a Profitable book for 
those that are burnt with Gunpowder. The first part of the 
English Dictionary a Compleat history of England The 
lives of the noble Grecians and Romans. The Tragedy of 
Darius and Julius Caesar A Compleat Collections of all 
the Laws of Virginia The new world of English words. 
The history of the Jews. The Countrey Justice The first 
part of Compleat Histrey The Expotion of the Creed The 
Surgeons mate An Essay concerning human understand- 
ing a Breife Treatise of Testaments The Decameron A 
Compendius Dictionary Lexicon Manuale. Lord Delamers 
Works. Sixteen sermons on several occasions ffarquhars 
Works. An abridgment of all the Statutes in fforce The 
standard of the Quakers. The Hearts Ease.' A Tryal of 
Faith Several Discourses of the great Duties of Natural 
Religion The Works of Josephus in three Volumes Doc- 
tor Reads Works. Abridgment of the Statutes of King 
Wm. Plutarchs Morals. Bethel or a fform for ffamilys 

226 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

Master Ralph Wormeley's library numbered 
several hundred volumes, and a man might have 

Discourses on the History of the whole world of wisdom 
the second and third books. Mr. John Banisters Works. 
The History of ffrance the first and fourth volumes of the 
turkish spy Sermons on several occasions resolutions and 
devisions of Cases of Conscience Plutarchs Morals the 
Second Volume and the third. A Manual Anatomy Eng- 
land's General Description Shakespears Works. Second 
Volume of Tom Browns Works Copies of Certain Letters. 
Ancient and the present State of the Empire of Germany. 
The Shepards oracles. Physoignomie and Chiromancy 
The Genral View of the Holy Scriptures The practice of 
piety The great law of consideration Trigonometrie Of 
generosity and constancy in the faith The History of the 
Revolutions in Sweeden The Marrow of Chyrurgery Tol- 
eration discuss 'd. Letters of Remarkables in Switzerland 
The office of Executors a Companion for a Chyrurgeon 
The Critick The Lively Oracles The heaven of health 
The history of the Conquest of China Valentine and Or- 
son, a Discourse on the Sacraments Some Motives to the 
Love of God. an Introduction to the Skill of Musick. Ser- 
mons and Discourses some of which never before printed. 
The Nature of Truth discuss 'd The Method of physick 
The new London Dispensatory, a Compendius Dictionary 
Milk for Babes an Introduction to the Eight parts of Latin 
speech The use of piety The European Mercury The 
Books of psalms. Notes on Mr. Lockes Essay of Human 
Understanding Britains Remembrancer An Infallible way 
to Contentment a view of all the religions in the world A 
Description of the Little world. The portraiture of his sa- 
cred Maj'y in his solitudes and suferings The London Dis- 
pensatory English Examples a Short Introduction to 
Gramar a Short Catechisme The Esopps ffables Works 
of M r Tho s Southerne Eight Lattin Books. 

? 2 7 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

found enough among them to gratify any inclina- 
tion. If his tastes were frivolous, here were " fifty 
comodys and tragedies, " and " The Genteel Siner. " 
Were he an epicure, he might regale himself with 
"the body of cookery," and revel in its appetizing 
recipes for potpies and the proper method of 
roasting a sucking pig; and if his mind were 
piously inclined, the resources of the library were 
unlimited. Side by side on its shelves stood " No 
Cross, No Crowne," "The ffamous Doct r Usher's 
Body of Divinity," Doct r ffuller's Holy State," 
and last and longest, the ninety-six sermons of the 
good parson Andros. 

Some of these old colonial sermons came to an 
unprofitable end. A bundle of them was laid away 
in a drawer, and, when sought for, it was learned 
that they had been torn up and used by the damsels 
of the household as curling-papers. The writer 
might have been at least half-satisfied in the re- 
flection that his discourses had touched the head, 
if not the heart. 

In spite of all the old inventories which are be- 
ing brought to light to show the existence of books 
and book lovers in the South, the fact remains that 
the Cavalier was no bookworm. He felt that a boy 
who had learned to ride, to shoot, and to speak the 
truth, had received the rudiments at least of edu- 
cation. Whatever he learned more than this was 
228 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

acquired either in the old field-school or more often 
from a private tutor, usually a clergyman of the 
Church of England. Some attempts were made 
by private persons to found public-schools. In 
1634, Benjamin Sym devised two hundred acres of 
land on the Pocosan River, together with the milk 
and increase of eight cows, for " the maintenance of 
a learned, honest man, to keep, upon the said 
ground, a Free-School for the education of the chil- 
dren of Elizabeth City and Kiquotan, from Mary's 
Mount downward to the Pocosan River." 

"Richard Russell in his will made July 24th, 
1667, and proved December 16th, the same year, 
now among the records of Lower Norfolk county, 
declared: 'the other pte of my Estate I give & 
bequeath One pte of itt unto Six of the poorest 
mens Children in Eliz: Riv'r, to pay for their 
Teaching to read & after these six are entred then 
if Six more comes I give a pte allsoe to Enter 
them in like manner. ' " 

In spite of private gifts, and individual effort, and 
public Acts of Assembly, the school system of New 
England did not and could not thrive at the South, 
because it was out of harmony with the spirit and in- 
stitutions of the people. The plantations were so 
separated that any assembling of the children was 
difficult, the spirit of caste was too strong to encour- 
age the free mingling of rich and poor, and the tradi- 
229 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

tions of the Cavalier were not traditions of scholar- 
ship. The sword, not the pen, had always been 
the weapon of the gentleman. Montrose, and 
not Milton, was his hero. When Captain Smith 
proudly boasted that he did not sit mewed tip in a 
library writing of other men's exploits, but that 
what his sword did, his pen writ, he expressed the 
ideal of the Colonial Cavalier. 

"I observe," quoth Spotswood ironically to the 
Virginia Burgesses, " that the grand ruling party 
in your House has not furnished chairmen of two 
of your standing committees who can spell Eng- 
lish or write common-sense, as the grievances un- 
der their own hand-writing will manifest." 

Ebenezer Cook in his " Voyage to Maryland," 
writes with acrimonious sarcasm of " A reverend 
judge who, to the shame of all the Bench, could 
write his name." The jest of the Sot- Weed Fac- 
tor scarcely outstripped the sober truth, and a cen- 
tury later the general ignorance was almost as 
dense. Several instances are on record where the 
servant signed his name and the master made his 
mark. The cross or other conventional sign was 
not uncommon, and in general the letters of the 
names are evolved slowly and painfully, as by men 
more apt with the gun -than with the quill. 

Hugh Jones, a Fellow of William and Mary 
College, writes of his countrymen that, for the 
230 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

most part, they are only desirous of learning what 
is absolutely necessary, in the shortest way. To 
meet this peculiarity Mr. Jones states that he has 
designed a royal road to learning, consisting of a 
series of text-books embracing an Accidence to 
Christianity, an Accidence to the Mathematicks, and an 
Accidence to the English To?igue. This last is "for 
the use of such boys and men as have never learned 
Latin, and for the Benefit of the Female Sex." 

The Bishop of London addressed a circular to 
the Virginia clergy inquiring as to the condition 
of their parishes. To the question, " Are there any 
schools in your parish?" the almost invariable an- 
swer was: "None." To the question, "Is there 
any parish library?" but a single affirmative re- 
sponse was received. One minister replied, " We 
have the The Book of Homilies, The Whole Duty of 
Man, and The Singing Psalms" 

It may be to this very scarcity of books that we 
owe that originality and vigor of thought which 
distinguished the leaders of the Revolution. Gov- 
ernor Page reported Patrick Henry as saying to 
him, " Naiteral parts is better than all the larnin 
upon yearth," and when to naiteral parts we add 
the mastery of a few English classics, we touch the 
secret of the dignity and virility which mark the 
utterances of these men who had known so little 
school-training. 

231 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

Randolph of Roanoke, the youngest son of 
his widowed mother, was taught by her as a 
little child. As he grew older he was left a good 
deal to his own devices, but his mind was not idle, 
and he had access to an unusually good library. 
Before he was ten, he had read Voltaire's " History 
of Charles XII. , " " Reynard the Fox, " and odd vol- 
umes of The Spectator. The " Arabian Nights" and 
Shakespeare were his delight. " I had read them, " 
he writes, "with Don Quixote, Quintus Curtius, 
Plutarch, Pope's Homer, Robinson Crusoe, Gulli- 
ver, Tom Jones, Orlando Furioso, and Thomson's 
Seasons, before I was eleven years old." 

Washington, unlike most of his compeers, was 
sent to school, first in the little cabin taught by 
the sexton of the church, a man named Hobby, 
and afterward to a more advanced school taught by 
a Mr. Williams. Here he decorated his writing 
and ciphering books, school-boy fashion, with non- 
descript birds done in pen- flourishes, and with ama- 
teur profile portraits. Here also he copied legal 
forms, bills of exchange, bonds, etc., till he ac- 
quired that methodical habit which afterward 
stood him in good stead. There were good and 
faithful teachers in those days, though they were 
not too common. The Scotch seem to have done 
most of the teaching in the colonies, and to have 
done it well. Jefferson recalls the " mouldy pies 
232 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

and good teaching" of the Scotch minister who 
taught him the languages; and many a Scotch 
name figures in the list of parish school-teachers. 

In an old file of the Maryland Gazette we may 
read the advertisement of John and Sally Stott, 
who propose to open a school "where English, 
arithmetic, book-keeping, mensuration, knitting, 
sewing and sample-work on cat-gut and muslin 
are to be taught in an easy and intelligible man- 
ner." 

The charges for schooling were not extravagant. 
The Reverend Devereux Jarratt taught a " plain 
school" for the equivalent of about thirty-three 
dollars a year. A tutor from London received a 
salary of thirty pounds sterling, and Jonathan 
Boucher charged for tuition twenty-five pounds a 
year, "the boy to bring his own bed." 

Boucher was at one time tutor to Parke Custis, 
then a somewhat headstrong boy of sixteen. 
Young Custis wished to travel abroad with his 
tutor, but Washington wrote to Mr. Boucher: "I 
can not help giving it as my opinion that his edu- 
cation is by no means ripe enough for a travelling 
tour. Not that I think his becoming a mere scholar 
is a desirable education for a gentleman, but I 
conceive a knowledge of books is the basis upon 
which all other knowledge is to be built, and in 
travelling he is to become acquainted with men 
233 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

and things rather than books. " Later in the letter 
he adds: " It is to be expected that every man who 
travels with a view of observing the laws and cus- 
toms of other countries should be able to give 
some description of the situation and government 
of his own." 

Boucher took just the opposite ground from his 
patron. He argued that the best education con- 
sisted in mingling with men and seeing the cul- 
ture of other lands. He lamented the provinciality 
of Virginia and its lack of intercourse with the 
great world. " Saving here and there a needy 
emigrant from Great Britain, an illiterate captain 
of a ship, or a subaltern merchant, to whom," he 
asks, " can a Virginia youth apply for a specimen 
of the manners, etc., of any other people?" 

The majority of the landed gentry were in sym- 
pathy with the views of Boucher rather than with 
those of Washington. Travel and education 
abroad, especially in England, were universally 
desired, and the influence on the colonies was 
marked, as the lad brought back with him from 
Oxford the views of the Cavaliers and their descen- 
dants, as the ship which bore him brought back the 
carved furniture, the massive plate, the leather- 
bound books, the coat of arms, and the panels for 
the hall fireplace. 

The record of matriculations at Oxford contains 
234 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

many colonial names. Here is " Henry Fitzhugh, 
s. William, of Virginia, Gent." (Christ Church) 
matriculated at the age of fifteen. Christopher 
and Peter Robinson, and Robert Yates, set down 
as from "Insula Virginia" register at Oriel, and 
Lewis Burwell at Balliol. The average age of 
matriculation among these colonial youth is eigh- 
teen; but boys were often sent to England, or 
"home," as the colonists delighted to call it, 
long before they were old enough for University 
life. 

Governor Spotswood's grandsons were sent over 
seas to Eton by their guardian, Colonel Moore, 
their father being dead. They boarded with a 
Mrs. Young, who showed a wonderfully good and 
tender heart, for when their guardian ceased to 
send remittances and the poor boys were left with- 
out resources, this kind landlady not only re- 
mitted the price of their board, which with charges 
for candles, fire and mending amounted to over 
twenty-eight pounds sterling, but actually supplied 
them with pocket-money to the extent of three 
pounds, and paid the expenses of "salt money, 
cost of montem poles, and montem dinner." 
When they left, Alexander wrote from London to 
their benefactress a manly if somewhat prim little 
letter, commencing: " Hon d Madam, I write by 
this opportunity to thank you for all your past 

235 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

favors to me and my brother. I hope it will be in 
my power one day or another to make you amends 
for all you have done for us," and signing him- 
self, "Your humble servant, Alexander Spots- 
wood." It is gratifying to know that these protes- 
tations did not come to naught, but that the good 
lady was repaid, not only in money, but in the life- 
long gratitude of the boys, who became distin- 
guished American citizens. 

The inheritance of a high and quick spirit came 
fairly to the boys of their race. Some quarter of 
a century before this letter was written, the Vir- 
ginia Gazette printed a communication from the 
father of these lads, then himself a boy. It is 
headed "An Hint for a Hint," and runs: 

"Mr. Parks, 

" I have learnt my Book, so far as to be able to 
read plain English, when printed in your Papers, 
and finding in one of them my Papa's name often 
mentioned by a scolding man called Edwin Con- 
way, I asked my Papa whether he did not design 
to answer him. But he replyd: 'No child, this 
is a better Contest for you that are a school Boy, 
for it will not become me to answer every Fool 
in his Folly, as the Lesson you learned the other 
day of the Lion and the Ass may teach you.' 
This Hint being given me, I copied out the said 
236 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

Lesson and now send you the same for my Answer 
to Mr. Conway's Hint from 

" Sir, your Humble Servant 
"John Spotswood. 

"Fab. 10. A Lion and an Ass. 

" An Ass was so hardy once as to fall a Mopping 
and Braying at a Lion. The Lion began at first 
to shew his Teeth and to stomach the Affront, 
But upon second Thoughts, Well, says he, Jeer 
on and be an Ass still, take notice only by the 
way, that it is the Baseness of your Character 
that has saved your Carcass." 

No doubt young John and Alexander treasured 
this piece of youthful audacity as a precious tradi- 
tion to be told and retold to admiring school- 
mates at Montem dinner, under the shadow of 
Eton Towers. 

In the Bland letters, there is an itemized account 
of the charges for a colonial boy at boarding school. 
Master Bland's expenses, when under the tuition of 
Mr. Clark, amounted to twenty-four pounds, ten 
shillings and two pence, and include the bills 
sent in by the apothecary, hosier, linen-draper, 
music-master and "taylor," and also the charges 
for " weekly allowance and lent, shugar and black- 
shoe." 

The charge for shugar is twelve shillings and 
237 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

ninepence, which seems exorbitant in our day of 
cheap sweets. Master Bland's second half-year's 
account charges for " milliner, board, coal and can- 
dles, pocket-money and stockener." 

There is no record of the profit Master Bland 
received from his schooling abroad, but it is to be 
feared that he shared the character of his young 
fellow-countrymen, of whom Jones reports that 
"they are noted to be more apt to spoil their 
school-fellows than improve themselves." The 
wildness of the young colonial students this rev- 
erend apologist accounts for very ingeniously, by 
explaining that the trouble lies in their being " put 
to learn to persons that know little of their temper, 
who keep them drudging in pedantick methods, 
too tedious for their volatile genius." 

The young Colonial Cavaliers exercised their 
volatile genius ax home as well as abroad, as any one 
may know who turns the yellow pages of the man- 
uscript college records at William and Mary. Un- 
der Stith's presidency we find " Y e following or- 
ders Unanimously agreed to" : 

" i. Ordered y* no scholar belonging to any 
school in the college, of what age, rank or quality 
so ever, do keep any race horse at y e college in y e 
town, or anywhere in the neighborhood, y* they 
be not anyway concerned in making races or in 
backing or abetting those made by others, and y* 
238 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

all race-horses kept in y e neighborhood of y e col- 
lege and belonging to any of y e scholars, be 
immediately dispatched and sent off and never 
again brought back, and all this under pain of y e 
severest animadversion and punishment." 

A second ordinance forbids any scholar belong- 
ing to the college, " to appear playing or betting 
at y e billiard or other gaming tables, or to be any 
way concerned in keeping or fighting cocks, under 
pain of y e like severe animadversions or punish- 
ments." 

They were an unruly and turbulent set of school- 
boys, these collegians, and the college records are 
full of their misdoings. Thomas Byrd, being 
brought before the Faculty on a charge of break- 
ing windows " in a rude and riotous mannor," was 
sentenced to submit to a whipping in the Gram- 
mar-School, or be expelled the college. The blood 
of the Byrds rebelled against such ignominy, and 
the boy refused to submit. His father then 
appeared before the Faculty and offered to compel 
him to obey, but this vicarious submission was 
considered inadequate, and he was dropped from 
the college. Again, it appears, that "whereas 
John Hyde Saunders has lately behaved himself 
in a very impudent and unheard-of mannor to the 
master of the Grammar-School, " he is directed to 
quit the college. The ushers are ordered to visit 
239 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

the rooms of the young gentlemen at least three 
times a week, after nine o'clock at night, and report 
to the president any irregularities. 

"No boy to presume to go into the kitchen." 
" No victuals sent to private rooms. " " No boy to 
lounge upon the college steps." So run the rules. 
They further provide " y* a person be appointed 
to hear such boys as shall be recommended by 
their parents or guardians, a chapter in the Bible 
every school-day at 12 o'clock, and y* he have y e 
yearly salary of one pistole for each boy so recom- 
mended." All these regulations, "animadver- 
sions," and punishments make us realize that in 
spite of its high-sounding charter, William and 
Mary was, after all, only a big boarding-school. 

When its charter was granted, a curious condi- 
tion was attached, providing that the president and 
professors should yearly offer two copies of Latin 
verses to the Governor or Lieutenant-Governor of 
Virginia. The bargain seems to have been strictly 
kept, for The Gazette records: 

" On this day sen-night, the president, masters 
and scholars of William and Mary College went, 
according to their annual custom, in a body to the 
Governor's, to present His Honor with two copies 
of Latin verses in obedience to their charter, as 
a grateful acknowledgement for two valuable tracts 
of land given the said college by their late Majes- 
240 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

ties, King William and Queen Mary. Mr Presi- 
dent delivered the verses to His Honor and two of 
the young gentlemen spoke them." 

In 1700, the college authorities ushered in the 
century with a grand celebration, including prize 
declamations and various exercises. The novel 
and exciting entertainment roused such an inter- 
est that visitors came from Annapolis and the 
Maryland shore, and even from the far-away col- 
ony of New York, while Indians thronged the 
streets to watch the gayety. The town then was 
at the height of its prosperity. 

Not content with a palace, a capitol, and a col- 
lege, Williamsburg actually aspired to own a book- 
store, which was after all not altogether unreason- 
able, since there was no considerable one south 
of Boston. Accordingly the college authorities 
met to consider the matter, and finally resolved 
that— 

" M r W m Parks intending to open a book-seller's 
shop in this Town, and having proposed to furnish 
the students of this College with such books at a 
reasonable price as the Masters shall direct him 
to send for, and likewise to take all the school- 
books now in the College and pay 35 p. cent on the 
sterling cost to make it currency, his proposals 
are unanimously agreed to." 

The first building of William and Mary College 
241 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

was planned, so they say, by Sir Christopher Wren, 
but it was burned down, one night only five years 
after the grand celebration, "the governor and 
all the gentlemen in town coming to the lament- 
able spectacle ; many of them getting out of their 
beds. " Again and again the building has suffered 
from the flames. Yet as it stands there to-day — 
with its stiff, straight walls stained and weather- 
beaten, its bricks laid up in the good old English 
fashion of stretchers and headers, its steps worn 
with the tread of generations — it is full of a pensive 
charm. Its record is one for Virginians to be 
proud of, since as one of them boasts : 

" It has sent out for their work in the world 
twenty-seven soldiers of the Revolution, two 
attorney-generals, nearly twenty members of Con- 
gress, fifteen senators, seventeen governors, thirty- 
seven judges, a lieutenant-general, two commo- 
dores, twelve professors, four signers of the 
Declaration, seven cabinet officers, a chief justice, 
and three presidents of the United States." 

If I was tempted at first, as I stood before the 
brick, barn-like building, to exclaim at its ugli- 
ness, my frivolous criticism was abashed, as this 
phantom procession filed through its doorway, for 
I too, who am not of their blood, claim a share in 
their greatness, and salute their names with rev- 
erent humility. 

242 



Laws, Punishments, and 
Politics 



Laws, Punishment w Pontes 




T is afar cry from Patrick Henry, 

pouring out defiance against the 

king, while his listeners as 

-<&$**» one man ec h oe( j his final 

words, " Liberty or death !," 
back to the night of the arrival of the English 
ships in Chesapeake Bay, when the box given 
under the royal seal was opened, and the names 
of the council who were to govern Virginia were 
found within. It would have seemed to the group 
of men standing about the sacred casket on that 
April night incredible that, within their prov- 
ince of Virginia in the next century, the authority 
of the king and the power of all England should be 
openly and successfully set at defiance. Yet so it 
came to pass, naturally, gradually and inevitably. 
The first settlers in Virginia lived in a political 
condition which may be described as a commu- 
nism, subject to a despotism. Their goods were 
held in a common stock, and they drew their ra- 
tions from " a common kettel, " but all the time they 
felt the strong arm of royal authority stretched 
across the Atlantic, to rule their affairs with- 
out consent of the governed. Both commu- 
245 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

nism and despotism worked badly for the settlers. 
The first promoted idleness, the second encouraged 
dissensions, discontent and tale-bearing, each party 
to a Colonial quarrel being eager to be the first to 
run home and lay his side of the story before the 
King. Sir Thomas Dale changed all this commu- 
nistic living. " When our people were fed out of 
the common store," writes one of the earliest set- 
tlers, " glad was he who could slip from his labor, or 
slumber over his taske he cared not how ; nay, the 
most honest among them would hardly take so 
much true paines in a weeke, as now for themselves 
they will doe in a day, neither cared they for the 
increase, presuming that howsoever the harvest 
prospered, the generall store must maintain them, 
so that wee reaped not so much corne from the 
labours of thirtie, as now three or foure doe pro- 
vide for themselves." 

Dale allotted to every man three acres of ground, 
and compelled each to work both for himself and 
for the public store. His rule was, on the whole, 
beneficent though arbitrary; but the settlers con- 
stantly suffered from the lack of power to make 
laws, or arrange their simplest affairs without 
seeking permission from king and council. 

Fortunately, after a few years a radical change 
was wrought ; a change whose importance cannot 
be overestimated. In 1619 Sir George Yeardley 
246 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

came over as Governor of Virginia. He pro- 
claimed that " those cruel laws by which the 
Ancient Planters had so long been governed" 
were now done away with, and henceforth they 
were to be ruled by English law, like all other 
English subjects. Nor was this all. Shortly 
after, followed one of those epoch-making decla- 
rations which posterity always wonders not to 
find printed in italics : " That the planters might 
have a hande in the governing of themselves, yt 
was grannted that a general assemblie shoulde be 
helde yearly once, whereat were to be present, the 
governor and counsell, with two burgesses from 
each plantation, freely to be elected by the inhabi- 
tants thereof, this assemblie to have power to make 
and ordaine whatsoever lawes and orders should 
by them be thought good and profitable for their 
subsistence." 

Thus the same year and almost the same month 
witnessed two events of deep significance to Vir- 
ginia, the purchase of the first African slaves, and 
the establishment of the first free Assembly in 
America. So strangely are the threads of destiny 
blended ! And thus, while the strife between king 
and people was just beginning to cast its shadow 
over England, there was quietly inaugurated here 
at James City a government essentially " of the 
people, by the people, and for the people." 
247 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

The measures they adopted at this first free As- 
sembly, the laws they made, the punishments they 
imposed, are of little importance. The fact of 
mighty moment is that they met, and though the 
scope of their power was limited, to be extended 
two years later, and though they were afterward 
to struggle on through varying fortunes to. the 
heights of entire freedom, yet this Assembly of 
1619 was forever to be memorable as the germ of 
representative government on this continent. 

In the Quire of the old brick church, these Bur- 
gesses gathered, twenty-two of them, from James 
City, Charles City, Henrico, Kiccowtan (now 
Hampton), Martin-Brandon, Smythe's Hundred, 
Martin's Hundred, Argall's Gift, Lawne's Planta- 
tion, Ward's Plantation, and Flowerda Hundred. 
First, led by Parson Bucke, they asked God's guid- 
ance; and on the principle that heaven helps those 
who help themselves, they then set themselves to 
the task of framing laws to take the place of the 
" Iron*Code" which Sir Thomas Dale had brought 
over from the Netherlands, and which strongly 
suggested the methods of the Inquisition. 

Dale's code declared absence from Sunday ser- 
vices a capital offense. One guilty of blasphemy 
a second time, was sentenced to have a bodkin 
thrust through his tongue. A Mr. Barnes, of Ber- 
muda Hundred, having uttered a detracting speech 
248 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

against a worthy gentleman in Dale's time, was 
condemned to have his tongue run through with 
an awl, to pass through a guard of forty men, and 
to be butted by every one of them, and at the head 
of the troop, knocked down, and footed out of the 
fort. A woman found guilty as a common scold, 
was sentenced to be ducked three times from a ship 
in the James River, and one mild statute declared 
that any person speaking disgraceful words of 
any person in the colony, should be tied, hand 
and foot together, upon the ground, every night 
for the space of one month. It must be said in 
excuse for the severities of Dale that he had a tur- 
bulent mob to discipline. He himself describes 
them as gathered in riotous or infected places, 
persons " so profane, of so riotous and treasonable 
intendments, that in a parcel of three hundred, 
not many gave testimony beside their name, that 
they were Christians." Another point to be re- 
membered in defence of this iron soldier, is that 
all punishments in those days were such as would 
seem to us cruel and unwarrantable in proportion 
to the offence. The gallows in London was never 
idle. Almost ever} 7 crime was capital. I read in 
the story of the Virginia adventurers in the Somer 
lies of a desperate fellow who, " being to be ar- 
raigned for stealing a Turky, rather than he would 
endure his triall, secretly conveighed himself to sea 

249 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

in a little boat, and never since was heard of. " I 
feel very confident that this poor " Turky"-stealer 
would never have tempted those stormy waters 
in a skiff, had he not known full well that a worse 
fate than drowning awaited him, if he stayed to 
stand his trial. 

The laws introduced by the House of Bur- 
gesses were strict enough, and their punishments 
sufficiently severe. The statutes enacted against 
" idlenesse" were so salutary that they would soon 
have exterminated such a social pest as the modern 
tramp. The law went even further than for- 
bidding idleness, and undertook to discipline those 
guilty of any neglect of duty. Thomas Garnett, 
who was accused by his master of wanton and 
profligate conduct, " and extreame neglect of his 
busineffe" was condemned " to stand fower dayes 
with his eares na} 7 led to the Pillory, and that he, 
every of those fower days, should be publiquely 
whipped." 

The humiliation of the criminal was the special 
end and aim of the punishment. Richard Buck- 
land, for writing a slanderous song concerning 
Ann Smith, was ordered to stand at the church- 
door during service with a paper round his hat, 
inscribed " Inimicus Libellus" and afterward to ask 
forgiveness of God, and also in particular of the 
defamed Ann Smith. Two convicted sinners were 
250 




> N 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

sentenced to stand in church with white sheets 
round their shoulders and white wands in their 
hands. 

Throughout the century, the statute-books of 
Virginia and Maryland show a vindictiveness 
toward criminals which is out of accord with the 
degree of civilization existing in the colonies. 
The crime of hog-stealing is visited with special 
retributions. It is enacted by the Maryland As- 
sembly that any person convicted as a hog-stealer 
"shall for the first offence stand in the pillory att 
the Provincial Court four Compleat Hours, & shall 
have his eares cropt, & pay treble damages; & for 
the second time, the offender shall be stigmatized 
in the forehead with the letter H, and pay treble 
damages; and for the third offence of Hogg steal- 
ing, he or they so offending shall be adjudged as 
fellons. And the Delinquent shall have noe Bene- 
fite of Clergy." In another note in the Maryland 
archives I find: "Putt to the Vote. Whither a 
Law. bee not necessary Prohibiting Negros or 
any other servants to keepe piggs, hoggs, or any 
other sort of Swyne uppon any pretence what- 
soever. " 

Hog-stealing seems to have ranked next to mur- 
der as an offence, and to have been punished almost 
as severely — perhaps on Shylock's principle, that 
they took life who took the means of livelihood ; 

253 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

and the hog in the early days was the chief wealth 
and maintenance of the settler. 

Superstition, as well as cruelty, played its part 
in the old criminal processes. The blood-ordeal 
long survived, and the belief was general that a 
corpse would bleed beneath the murderer's touch. 
On one occasion, when a serving- woman in Mary- 
land had died under suspicious circumstances, her 
fellow-servants were summoned one by one to lay 
hands on the corpse ; but as no blood appeared be- 
neath their touch, the jury declared the woman's 
death to be the act of God. 

On the whole, the inhabitants of the Southern 
Colonies, excepting always the negroes, were sin- 
gularly free from superstition. The witchcraft 
delusion, which played such havoc in New Eng- 
land, never obtained a foothold in the Cavalier 
Colonies. Grace Sherwood was, it is true, accused 
in Princess Anne County of being a witch, and sen- 
tenced to the test of sinking or floating when 
thrown into the water; but her case stands out 
quite alone in the annals of Virginia, whereas the 
same county records show several suits against 
accusers as defamers of character. Here we find 
"Jn° Byrd and Anne his wife suing Jn° Pites" 
in an action of Defamation ; their petition sets 
forth " that the Defend 1 had falsely & Scandalously 
Defamed them, saying they had rid him along the 
254 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

sea-side & home to his own house, by which kind 
of Discourse they were Reported & rendered as if 
they were witches, or in league with the Devill, 
praying ioo^ sterl. Damage with cost. The Deft, 
for answer acknowledgeth that to his thoughts, 
apprehension or best knowledge they did serve him 
soe. " The jury found for the defendant, but 
brought no action against the witches who did 
serve him so. 

In lower Norfolk County the def amer did not es- 
cape so easily, for" Whereas Ann Godby, the Wife 
of Tho. Godby hath contrary to an ord 1 * of y e Court 
bearing date in May 1655, concerning some slan- 
ders & scandalls cast upon women under y e notion 
of witches, hath contemptuously acted in abusing 
& Taking y e good name & Credit of nic° Robin- 
son's wife, terming her a witche, as by severall 
deposicons appeares. It is therefore ord d that y e 
s d Tho. Goodby shall pay three hundred pounds of 
Tob° & Caske fine for her contempt of y e menconed 
order (being y e first time) & also pay & defray y e 
cost of sute together w th y e Witnesses' charges at 
twenty pounds tob° p day." 

Maryland, too, may boast of an unstained record, 
and of a vigorous warfare against the persecution. 
An old record tells how John Washington, Esquire, 
of Westmoreland County, in Virginia, having made 
complaint against Edward Prescott, merchant, 
255 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

"Accusin s d Prescott of ffelony under the Gov- 
ernm* of this Province (*. e. Maryland) Alleaging 
how that hee, the s d Prescott, hanged a Witch on 
his ship as hee was outward bound from England 
hither the last yeare. Uppon w ch complaynt of the 
s d Washington, the Gov r caused the s d Edward 
Prescott to bee arrested." Prescott admitted that 
one Elizabeth Richardson was hanged on his ship, 
outward bound from England, but claimed that 
John Greene, being the master of the vessel, was 
responsible, and not he. "Whereupon (standing 
upon his Justificaon) Proclamacaon was made by 
the Sheriffe in these very words. O yes, cSrc. Ed- 
ward Prescott Prisoner at the Bar uppon suspition 
of ffelony stand uppon his acquittall. If any person 
can give evidence against him, lett him come in, 
for the Prisoner otherwise will be acquitt. And 
noe one appearing, the Prisoner is acquitted by the 
Board." Yet, though there is not a single con- 
viction of witchcraft to stain the legal records 
of Maryland, her statute-book in 1639 declared 
sorcery, blasphemy and idolatry punishable with 
death; accessories before the fact to be treated 
as principals. The accusation of blasphemy or 
idolatry was always a serious one, and the more so 
on account of its vagueness. Scant proof was re- 
quired, and the punishment was severe. 

A Virginia article of war enacted that swearing 
256 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

or drunkenness among the soldiery, at the third 
offense be punished by riding the wooden-horse 
for an hour, with a musket tied to each foot, and 
by asking forgiveness at the next meeting for 
prayer and preaching. This sentence requiring 
the offender to ask forgiveness is very common in 
the pages of the statute books as a sequel to the in- 
fliction of punishment. Punishment was still dis- 
ciplinary. Society was a pedagogue and the 
criminal a naughty school-boy, who must go down 
on his knees in a proper state of humility before 
he can be pardoned. 

After Bacon's Rebellion, the rebels were sen- 
tenced to go through this form of begging forgive- 
ness with a halter round the neck, as a symbol of 
the right of the Governor to hang them all if he 
saw fit. One William Potts, being of a haughty 
spirit, or perhaps possessed of a grim sense of hu- 
mor, wore round his neck instead of the hempen 
halter, "a Manchester binding," otherwise a piece 
of tape. But the jest, if jest it were, was not ap- 
parently appreciated by the authorities, for it 
appears that the Sheriff was straightway deputed 
to see " that said Potts performe the Law, "' On the 
whole, the "said Potts" must have thought himself 
fortunate, for trifling with magistrates was sternly 
dealt with in his day, and answering back by no 
means tolerated. 

2 57 ... 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

From the times of Dale onward, a great many 
statutes were enacted, designed to silence women's 
tongues. An old Virginia law runs: "Whereas 
oftentimes many brabling women often slander 
and scandalize their neighbors, for which their 
poore husbands are often brought into charge- 
able and vexatious suits and cast in great damages, " 
it is enacted that all women found guilty of the 
above offence be sentenced to ducking. The pun- 
ishment was undoubtedly successful for the time — 
that is, while the criminal was underwater; but it 
is hard to believe that bad tempers or gossiping 
habits were permanently cured by the ducking- 
stool. This curious implement of discipline may 
still be seen in the old prints. It consists of a 
chair bound to the end of a long board, which, 
when released on the land side, plunged the occu- 
pant of the chair under water as many times as 
the magistrate or " her poore husband" required. 

Near the court-house, in every town, stood a 
ducking-stool, a whipping-post, a pillory, and a 
pair of stocks. In the pillory the criminal stood on 
a raised platform, with his hands and head thrust 
through a board on the level with his shoulders, 
in helpless ignominy. At Queenstown a man 
found guilty of selling short measure was com- 
pelled to stand thus for hours, with the word cheat 
written on his back, while the populace pelted him 
258 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

with stones and eggs. The stocks, while equally 
ignominious, were somewhat more comfortable, 
since the malefactor was seated on a bench with 
his hands and feet pinioned by the jointed planks 
before him. These were mild forms of punish- 
ment. For serious offences, far harsher methods 
were adopted. Ears were cropped from bleeding 
heads, hands and feet were cut off, or the offender 
was sentenced to whipping at the cart's tail, 
whereupon he was tied to the back of a cart, slowly 
driven through the town, and thus flogged, as he 
went, by the common executioner. A not unusual 
punishment was branding the cheek, forehead, or 
shoulder with the first letter of the crime com- 
mitted — as R. , for running away; P., for perjury, 
or S. L., for Seditious Libel. Indeed, the man 
who escaped with his life from the hands of col- 
onial justice, might count himself fortunate, 
though he were condemned to go through the re- 
mainder of his existence minus a hand, a foot, or 
an ear; or to have the ignominy of his sentence 
written on his face for all to read; for sterner 
punishment than any of these was possible. 

Death itself was meted out not infrequently, 
and the barbarities of drawing and quartering in 
some instances, fortunately rare, added horror to 
punishment, and the statistics we find quite calmly 
set down make the blood run cold. 
259 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

At a Court held for Goochland County the ninth day of 
October Anno Domi MDCCXXXIII for laying the 
County levey. 
Present : 

John meming, Daniel Sfoner, Tarlton ffleming, 
George Payne, William Cabbell, James Skelton, 
Gent. Justices. 
Goochland County Dr. Tobacco. 

To Thomas Walker & Joseph Dabbs sub-sherifs 

for a mistake in the levey in 1732 10 

To Do. for going to Williamsburg for a Comis- 
sion of Oyer & Terminer to try Champion, 
Lucy, Valentine, Sampson, Harry & 
George, Negros 90 miles going at 2lb and 90 
miles returning at 2lb p. mile 360 

To Do. for sumoning the Justices and attending 

the Court for the tryal of the said Negros... 200 

To Do. for Executing Champion & Valentine, 

2501b each 500 

To Do. for providing Tarr, burying the trunk, 
cutting out the quarters a Pott, Carts & 
horses carrying and setting up the heads & 
quarters of the two Negros at the places men- 
tioned by order of Court 2000 

And this was in our own country, only a century 
and a half ago ! 

A Maryland statute enumerates among capital 
offences: manslaughter, malicious trespass, for- 
gery, receiving stolen goods, and "stealth of one's 
self" — which is the unlawful departure of a servant 
260 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

out of service or out of the colony without the 
consent of his master or mistress — " offender to 
suffer pains of death by hanging except the offender 
can read clerk-like, and then he shall lose his 
hand, and be burned in the hand or forehead with 
a hot iron, and forfeit his lands at the time of the 
offense committed. " This test of ability to read — 
" legii ' aut non legit ?" — was manifestly a clause in- 
serted to favor the clergy, and so woven into the 
tissue of mediaeval law, that the Reformation had 
been powerless to unravel it. 

It is noticeable that the economical planters 
wisely preferred those forms of punishment, which 
cost the State nothing but the services of the con- 
stable and the executioner, to the confinement in 
prison, which involved the support of the criminal 
at public expense. Prisons, of course, existed 
almost from the beginning. In the Maryland 
archives of 1676, I read that " Cap* Quigly brought 
into this house the act for Building the State House 
and prisson at S fc Maries, and desires to know what 
manner of Windowes the house shall have." It 
is at length decided accordingly by the Assembly 
" that the windowes are to bee of Wood with sub- 
stanciall Iron barres and th 4 the wood of the frame 
of the Windowes be layd in Oyle. " For the safer 
guarding of the prisoners, it is also directed that 
the windows, which were to be only twenty by 

261 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

thirty inches in size, be protected by " Three Iron 
Barres upright, and two athwart. " 

The prisons found little occupation as com- 
pared with the pillory and the whipping-post. 
The latter was the common corrector of drunken- 
ness, which was a too frequent offence in those old 
days in the Cavalier Colonies, when the gentry 
sipped their madeira over the polished dining- 
table and the poor man mixed his toddy in his 
noggin of pewter or wood. All men drank, and 
most men drank too much. Wines played an 
important part in the colonial imports. A Vir- 
ginia statute of 1645 fixed the price of canary and 
sherry at thirty pounds of tobacco, madeira and 
" Fyall" at twenty pounds, while aqua-vitae and 
brandy ran up to forty. A few years later Master 
George Fletcher, his heirs and executors, were 
granted by statute, the sole right to brew in wooden 
vessels for fourteen years. Maryland laid a tax 
upon " Rhume, Perrie, Molasses, Sider, Quince 
Drink or Strong Beer Imported, each 5 lbs tob. 
per gal." 

The State, having made a handsome profit from 
the selling of all these wines and "hot waters," 
straightway became very virtuous against the poor 
wight who took too much. He was sentenced 
to the joys of the whipping-post, or to be laid 
in the stocks, or to pay a fine; thus again mak- 
262 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

ing liquor pay a revenue to the State. We 
have an amusing description of what constitutes 
drunkenness, from a Colonial Dogberry of the 
seventeenth century, who sapiently observes: 
" Now, for to know a drunken man the better, the 
Scripture describes them to stagger and reel to 
and fro; And so, where the same legs which 
carry a man into the house can not bring him out 
again, it is a sufficient sign of drunkenness." 
The difficulty in convicting these offenders with 
two pairs of legs, lay in the general sentiment of 
the community, that after all there was no great 
harm in taking a little too much of so good a thing 
as liquor. 

The same public sentiment protected duelling, 
which was under the ban of the statute-books; 
but these old laws show the futility of attempt- 
ing to legislate far in advance of public opinion. 
The law opposed it, but the prevailing senti- 
ment sustained it. The number of duels fought 
at the South in colonial times has been grossly 
over-estimated, but they were fought; and the 
general feeling in regard to the practice was 
accurately expressed by Oglethorpe of Georgia, 
that typical Cavalier and true gentleman of 
the old school, who, when asked if he approved of 
duelling, made answer, " Of course a man must 
protect his honor." This curious notion that a 
263 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

man's honor was a vague but very sensitive article, 
worn about the person, and capable of being- in- 
jured by any brawler who chanced to jostle against 
it at an "ordinary," or any vagabond who wished 
to pick a quarrel with his betters on the road, was 
a relic of feudal days, when hostile factions met 
and fought at every corner ; and the Colonial Cava- 
lier held to it loyally, never asking himself why 
or wherefore. This theory, which makes the in- 
dividual and not the State the avenger of insult 
and injury, found its logical climax in the methods 
adopted by Colonel Charles Lynch, a Virginia 
planter before the Revolution, and the author of a 
quick and simple form of law called by his name, 
and very popular still, though, to do him justice, 
it must be said that his followers have carried 
his principles further than their author intended. 
He never took life, but aimed simply to vindicate 
his own honor and that of his country by in- 
flicting lashes on those who differed with him 
politically, and thought he did God service when 
he strung up suspected Tories, and forced them 
to shout " Liberty forever!" 

Thus our study of the lawmaking and law- 
breaking records has brought us all the way from 
that House of Burgesses sitting at James Cittie in 
1 619— their hearts full of loyalty to his Majesty 
King James the First, and full of gratitude for 
264 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

the slender liberties he has seen fit to loan rather 
than grant them — to the brink of the Revolution, 
to parties of the Crown and of the people, to the 
hall in the Virginia Capitol where the Assembly 
is boiling with wrath and defiance against George 
the Third and his ministers, who have dared to 
insult the rights and liberties of a free people. It 
is a mighty transformation to have been brought 
about in a century and a half. The Southern 
Colonies did not give up their allegiance without 
a bitter struggle of reason against sentiment, a 
struggle which New England never knew; but at 
length the loyalty which had bowed down to fallen 
royalty at Breda and yielded Charles II. so early a 
recognition that he quartered the arms of Virginia 
with those of England, France, and Scotland, and 
spoke of it as the Old Dominion — at last, this gen- 
erous, faithful, confiding lo3^alty had been outraged 
past endurance. But still the old traditions lin- 
gered. Gen. John Mason says: " So universal was 
the idea that it was treason and death to speak 
ill of the king, that I even now remember a 
scene in the garden at Springfield, when my 
father's family were spending the day there on 
a certain Sunday, when I mast have been very 
small. Several of the children having collected 
in the garden, after hearing in the house among 
our elders many complaints and distressing fore- 
265 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

bodings as to this oppressive course towards 
our country, we were talking the matter over in 
our own way, and I cursed the King, but im- 
mediately begged and obtained the promise of the 
others not to tell on me." 

Yet at this moment, when the young rebel was 
trembling in the garden for the effects of his aw- 
ful temerity, America was already on the eve of 
the outbreak which severed her forever from the 
King and the Kingdom of Great Britain. The 
allegiance of the loyal colonies could not have 
fallen so suddenly, but for the long years of sap- 
ping and mining which had gone on silently, yet 
surely, doing their work. 

From the time of the thrusting out of Sir John 
Harvey and his return, backed by the authority of 
Charles the First, there had been a war waged by 
proxy between king and people. The governors 
represented tyranny, and the Assembly opposed 
each encroachment. Eye to eye they stood, like 
wrestlers, neither side yielding a point without a 
struggle, yet both expressing equal loyalty and love 
for the King, and equal reverence for his authority. 
Virginia long preserved "an after-dinner alle- 
giance" to the Crown even when she openly defied 
its policy. Virginians drank his Majesty's health, 
wiped their lips, and imprecated his Majesty's 
Navigation Acts. If their political creed bound 
266 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

them to the fiction that the King could do no wrong, 
they cherished no such delusion concerning his 
deputies. 

When Sir William Berkeley, as despotic at 
heart as his Stuart master, undertook to play the 
tyrant in Virginia, the country blazed out into a 
rebellion, which died only with the death of 
Nathaniel Bacon, its leader. Bacon was a rebel, 
but a rebel of the type of Washington and Patrick 
Henry — one who believed in the motto which Jef- 
ferson engraved on his seal, " Rebellion against 
tyrants is obedience to God." What vigor and 
eloquence are thrown into his proclamations! 
They belong to the brightest pages of American 
literature. Read but the opening of 

"NATHANIEL BACON ESQ'r, HIS MANIFESTO CONCERN- 
ING THE PRESENT TROUBLES IN VIRGINIA. 

"If vertue be a sin, if Piety be giult, all the 
Principles of morality goodness and Justice be 
perverted, Wee must confesse That those who are 
now called Rebells may be in danger of those high 
imputations, Those loud and severall Bulls would 
affright Innocents and render the defence of o r 
Brethren and the enquiry into o r sad and heavy 
oppressions, Treason. But if there bee, as sure 
there is, a just God to appeal too, if Religion and 
Justice be a sanctuary here, If to plead y e cause 

267 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

of the oppressed, If sincerely to aime at his Mat ie9 
Honour and the Publick good without any reser- 
vation or by Interest, If to stand in the Gap after 
soe much blood of o r dear Brethren bought and 
sold, If after the losse of a great part of his Ma ties 
Colony deserted and dispeopled, freely with o r 
lives and estates to indeavor to save the remayn- 
ders bee Treason, God Almighty Judge and lett 
guilty dye. But since wee cannot in o r hearts 
find one single spott of Rebellion or Treason or 
that wee have in any manner aimed at the sub- 
verting y e setled Government or attempting of the 
person of any either magistrate or private man not 
with standing the severall Reproaches and Threats 
of some who for sinister ends were disaffected to us 
and censured o r ino[cent] and honest design es, 
and since all people in all places where wee have 
yet bin can attest o r civill, quiet, peaseable behav- 
iour farre different from that of Rebellion and 
tumultuous persons, let Trueth be bold and all the 
world know the real Foundations of pretended 
giult." 

When this ardent and impetuous nature was van- 
quished as alone it could be vanquished — by 
death — Berkeley might, by judicious magnani- 
mity, have healed the wounds of civil war; but, 
instead, he pursued the conquered rebels with a 
malignant perseverance, which seemed to grow 
268 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

by what it fed on. "Mr. Drummond," he said 
ironically to a follower of Bacon brought to him 
as a prisoner," you are very welcome ! I am more 
glad to see yon than any man in Virginia. You 
shall be hanged in half an hour." 

Twenty-three leaders of this rebellion were thus 
executed before Berkeley stayed the bloody hand 
of his vengeance. " The old fool, " quoth the King, 
"hath taken more lives in that naked country, 
than I for my father's murder!" 

Bacon's death remains one of the mysteries of 
history. Some said he died of miasma in the 
Virginia swamps; some hinted that his foes 
poisoned his food, so sudden and mysterious was 
his ending; and lest Berkeley's revenge should 
extend to insulting the very corpse of his foe, 
Bacon's followers buried him with the greatest 
secrecy, and no man knoweth the resting place of 
this first colonial champion of popular rights. But 
the spirit of popular liberty did not die with Bacon, 
nor vice-royal tyranny with Berkeley. Culpeper, 
Howard, and a score of others came over from 
England, one after another, all differing on many 
points of provincial policy, but united in the de- 
termination to fill their own pockets and the royal 
exchequer by means of colonial revenue. " Lord 
Colepepper," commented Beverley, "reduced the 
greatest perquisite of his place to a certainty, 
269 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

which before was only gratuitous; that is, instead 
of the masters of ships making presents of Liquors 
or provisions toward the Governor's housekeeping, 
as they were wont to do, he demanded a certain 
amount of money, remitting that custom." Such 
petty exactions as this were a dangerous experi- 
ment with a vehement and high-spirited people, 
who were willing to give much, but to yield nothing. 

The justice and moderation of Spotswood's gov- 
ernment held back the tide of popular revolt for 
some time, and the French and Indian War roused a 
final flicker of loyalty to the mother-country ; but 
England's success in that struggle cost her the 
American provinces. When Quebec surrendered 
to Wolfe's troops, and the French force was with- 
drawn from Canada, the Comte de Vergennes 
prophesied the coming revolution against England. 
" The colonies," said he, " will no longer need her 
protection. She will call on them to contribute 
toward supporting the burdens they have helped to 
bring on her, and they will answer by striking off 
all dependence." 

In 1768 affairs looked stormy in Virginia, and 
Lord Botetourt was sent over to prophesy smooth 
things and allay popular irritation, without com- 
mitting the government by definite promises. The 
man was well chosen for the task. Junius de- 
scribed him as a cringing, bowing, fawning, sword- 
270 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

bearing courtier. Horace Walpole said his gra- 
ciousness was enamelled on iron. He came, he 
saw, he conquered Virginia in a bloodless victory, 
but Virginia did not stay conquered. When the 
colonists presented an address which he was 
pleased to consider insubordinate, Botetourt dis- 
solved the Assembly ; but they retired to a private 
house, elected Peyton Randolph moderator, and 
prepared and signed a resolution to abstain from 
all merchandise taxed by Parliament. 

The beginning of the end was at hand. The 
farce of the repeal of the Stamp Act and its reim- 
position went on. Botetourt went home, and Lord 
Dunmore, the last of the hated race of governors, 
came over. His imbecile policy, at once timid 
and tyrannous, hastened the march of events, but 
the end was inevitable. "Colonies," said Turgot, 
" are like fruits, which cling to the tree only till 
they ripen." So the event proved in America — 
Virginia and Massachusetts, Maryland and Rhode 
Island, travelling by different roads, reached the 
same point of determination at any cost to throw 
off the yoke of British oppression. Henceforth 
they were to be no more provincials, but patriots ; 
and Cavalier and Puritan struck hands in the 
hearty good-will of a common cause. 
271 



Sickness and Death 



SICKNESS <wD£PH. 





IONEER life is all very well 
when the adventurer is in high 
health and spirits; but when 
sickness comes, he must be stout of heart 
indeed if he does not sigh for the com- 
forts of a civilized home. The poor set- 
tlers had a sorry time of it in that first 
fatal summer on the banks of the James, 
when they breathed in malaria from the 
marshes and drank the germs of fever 
and " fluxes" in the muddy water. " If 
there were any conscience in men," wrote 
gallant George Percy, " it would make their hearts 
bleed to hear the pitiful murmurings and outcries 
of our sick men, without relief, every day and 
night for the space of six weeks ; some departing 
out of the world, many times three or four in a 
night, in the morning their bodies trailed out of 
their cabins, like dogs, to be buried." 

The adventurers profited by the lesson of these 
troublous times; for as soon as the settlement was 
fairly re-established under Dale, the}^ set to work 
upon a hospital. On the river opposite Henrico, 
they put up " a guest-house for ye sicke people, a 
275 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

high seat and wholesome aire," and christened the 
place, Mo wit Malado. The chronicles are provok- 
ingly silent as to any details of this first American 
sanitorium. They say nothing of its arrange- 
ments, its comforts, or its conveniences. We do not 
know even the names of those who shared its rude 
shelter, or of the physicians who treated them. 
From time to time the mention of some doctor 
is interwoven with the history of the colonists, 
but he passes as a pale shadow, with none of the 
character and substance of the gallant captains, 
the doughty burgesses, and the tipsy parsons. 
Doctor Bohun, who is described as "brought up 
amongst the most learned Surgeons and Physi- 
tions in Netherlands," came over and stayed with 
the settlers for a while, but Lord La Warre carried 
him off as his medical adviser to the " Western 
lies," that his Lordship's gout might be "asswaged 
by the meanes of fresh dyet, especially Oranges 
and Limons, an undoubted remedie for that dis- 
ease" ; and a little later the good doctor perished 
in a sea-fight with Spaniards on the ship Mar- 
garet and John. Dr. Simons' name is signed to 
one of the histories, but he too fades away and 
leaves no trace, and a Dr. Pot has survived only 
through honorable mention, as " our worthy phy- 
sition." 

Either the country was too healthy, or the in- 
276 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

habitants too poor to encourage immigration 
among doctors, for they were few and far between, 
and we find men of other trades acting in the ca- 
pacity of physician. There was Captain Norton, 
for instance, "a valiant, industrious gentleman 
adorned with many good qualities besides Physicke 
and Chirurgery, which for the publicke good, he 
freely imparted to all gratis, but most bountifully 
to y e poore." 

It was common for barbers to combine the use 
of the knife with that of the razor, and for the 
apothecary to prescribe, as well as mix, his own 
drugs. Colonel Byrd writes that in Fredericks- 
burg, " besides Col. Willis, who is the top man of 
the place, there are only one merchant, a tailor, 
a smith, an ordinary-keeper, and a lady who acts 
both as doctress and coffee-house keeper." A list 
of prominent citizens in Baltimore in the eigh- 
teenth century, includes a barber, two carpenters, 
a tailor, a parson, and an inn-keeper, but no doctor; 
unless we reckon as such Dame Hughes and Dame 
Littig, who are registered as midwives. 

The isolation of plantation life made it doubly 
difficult to depend on doctors, and as a result, each 
family had its own medicine-chest, and its own 
recipes and prescriptions handed down from gen- 
eration to generation, and brought oftentimes from 
across the sea. Herbs played an important part 
2 77 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. . 

in the pharmacopoeia, both because they were 
easily obtained, and because tradition endowed 
them with mysterious virtues. An old medical 
treatise assures its readers that " Nature has 
stamped on divers plants legible characters to 
discover their uses" ; that baldness may be cured 
by hanging-moss, and freckles by spotted plants. 
Ragwort, and periwinkle, and Solomon's Seal all 
had their special merits; but sage was prime 
favorite, and its votary declares it a question how 
one who grows it in his garden and uses it freely 
can ever die. Next to ease of preparation, the 
prime requisite of a medicine was strength. 
Violent purges and powerful doses of physic or 
of " The Bark" were always in favor. The simple 
ailments of childhood were dosed with such 
abominations as copperas and pewter-filings, and 
these unhappy infants were fed on beverages of 
snake-root or soot-tea. One vile compound, 
common as it was odious, was snail pottage, made of 
garden shell-snails washed in small beer, mixed 
with earth-worms, and then fried in a concoction 
of ale, herbs, spices, and drugs. 

Yet our ancestors knew how to brew good-tast- 
ing things. The letter book of Francis Jerdone, 
of Yorktown, Virginia, records under date 1746, 
"A receit how to make Burlington's Universal 
Balsam. 

278 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 



Balsam Peru 

Best Storax 

Benjamin, impregnated with sweet Almonds 

Alloes Succatrinx 

Myrrh Elect 

Purest Frankincense 

Roots of Angelica 

Flowers of St. John Wort . 
One pint of the best Spirit of Wine. 



I 


oz. 


2 


oz. 


3 


oz. 


. % 


oz. 


• % 


oz. 


■ % 


oz. 


■ % 


oz. 


. X 


oz. 



To be bottled up and Set in the Sun for 20 or 
30 days together, to be shaken twice or thrice a 
day. Take about 30 drops going to bed in Tea 
made of pennyroyal, Balm or Speer mint." 

This prescription has the great defect of being 
too good, and might have a tendency to tempt the 
young to acquire the disease in order to be treated to 
the remedy. Angelic Snuff was another agreeable 
medicament, warranted to cure all head troubles 
and help the' palsy, megrims, deafness, apoplexy, 
and gout. What a pity that only the name of this 
cure remains to our generation, whose megrims 
alone would empty so many boxes of the invaluable 
snuff! 

The early settlers could, if they would, have 
learned some useful lessons in the treatment of 
disease from the Indians, who at least understood 
making the skin share the work of the stomach. 
A primitive, but very effective, way of treating 
fevers and similar ailments among the natives was 
279 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

by the sweating-oven. The Indian patient would 
creep into these mounds, under which a fire had 
been lighted, while the medicine-man poured on 
water from above, creating a mighty steam, in 
which the patient would continue till even Indian 
fortitude could hold out no longer, when he would 
crawl out, and, rushing down to the nearest stream, 
plunge headlong into its cold waters. All this pro- 
cess was, of course, performed amid incantations 
as mysterious to the whites as the phraseology of 
a modern physician to a savage. 

This treatment was more in harmony with 
modern ideas than the methods which prevailed 
among the English. When the two Spotswood 
boys were sent across the sea to Eton, to school, 
they spent their vacations with their aunt, Mrs. 
Campbell, who writes to their landlady at the end 
of their stay : " I am very Sorry, Madam, to send 
them back with such bad coughs, though I have 
nursed Jack who was so bad that we were obliged 
to Bleed him, and physick him,- that he is much 
better. I can't judge how they got them (the 
coughs). My son came home with one, and has 
never been out of the house but once since, and 
these children have always laid warm, and lived 
constantly in the house. " These poor little victims 
of the coddling system would probably have re- 
covered rapidly in the steam-bath of their native 
280 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

Virginia and the fresh air of her pine forests, but 
instead, they are sent back from one hothouse to 
another. "I beg," adds their affectionate, but 
misguided aunt, " that they may be kept in a very 
warm room, and take the drops I send every night, 
and the pectoral drink several times a day, and 
that they eat no meat or drink anything but warm 
barley water and lemon juice, and, if Aleck in- 
creases, to get Blooded." It is a great relief, and 
something of a surprise, to learn that Aleck and 
his brother John lived to come back to America 
and figure in the Revolution. Perhaps their 
recollections of the dosing and "blooding" they re- 
ceived in their youth threw additional energy into 
their opposition to the oppression of England. 

Cupping, leeching, and all sorts of blood-letting 
were the chief dependence in olden times in all 
cases of fever. The free use of water, now so 
universal, would then have been thought fatal. 
The poor patient dreaded the doctor more than 
the disease, and often with reason. Anaesthetics, 
that best gift of science to a suffering world, were 
unknown, and surgery was vivisection with the 
victim looking on, conscious and quivering. 

The doctor in the Cavalier Colonies was regarded 
with almost as much suspicion as the parson — as a 
cormorant, ready and anxious to prey on the com- 
munity, and to be held in check by all the severi- 
281 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

ties of the law. Virginia in 1657 passed statutes 
regulating surgeons' fees. In 1680 physicians 
were compelled to declare under oath the value of 
their drugs, and the court allowed them fifty per 
cent advance on the cost. If any physician was 
found guilty of neglecting a patient, he was liable 
to fine and punishment. 

In the eighteenth century, still stricter laws were 
framed, "because of surgeons, apothecaries and 
unskillful apprentices who exacted unreasonable 
fees, and loading their patients with medicine." 
The fees fixed by this statute are " one shilling 
per mile and all medicines to be set forth in the 
bill." The price for attending a common fracture 
is set down at two pounds, and double the sum for 
attending a compound fracture. A university 
degree entitled the practitioner to higher charges, 
but its posssesion was rare. Most doctors were 
trained up in the offices of older men as apprentices, 
pounders of drugs, and cleaners of instruments, 
as the old painters began by preparing paints and 
brushes for the master. 

A modern man of science would smile at the 
titles of the old medical works solemnly consulted 
by our forbears. " A Chirurgicall Booke" sounds in- 
teresting, and " The Universall Body of Physick" ; 
but they are not so alluring as "The Way to 
Health, long life and Happiness," nor so attractive 
282 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

to the ignorant as "The Unlearned Keymiss." 
Perhaps the struggling physicians and chirurgians 
who doctored by these old books and their common- 
sense, helped as many and harmed no more than 
the chemist of to-day, with his endless pharma- 
copoeia of coal-tar products, tonics, and stimulants; 
or the specialist who, instead of " the Whole Body 
of Physick," devotes himself wholly to a single 
muscle, or nerve-ganglion. 

In spite of the chill of popular disfavor and of 
the difficulties of professional training, good and 
noble men worked on faithfully at the business of 
helping the sick and suffering in the colonies. 
The Maryland annals tell of a Dr. Henry Steven- 
son, who built him a house near the York road so 
elegant, that the neighbors called it "Stevenson's 
Folly. " If there was any envy in their hearts, how- 
ever, it changed to gratitude and admiration when 
the small-pox appeared in their midst, and the 
large-hearted doctor turned his mansion into a 
hospital. It is hard for us who live after the days of 
Jenner, to appreciate the terror of the word small- 
pox. In the eighteenth century pitted faces were 
the rule. Fathers feared to send their sons to Eng- 
land, so prevalent was the disease there. An old 
journal advertises: "Wanted, a man between 
twenty and thirty years of age, to be a foot- 
man and under-butler in a great family ; he must be 

283 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

of the Church of England, and have had the small- 
pox in the natural way." 

This enlightened Dr. Stevenson, of Stevenson's 
Folly, made Maryland familiar with the process 
of inoculation, which antedated vaccination. He 
advertises in The Maryland Gazette of 1765 that he 
is ready to inoculate " any gentlemen that are 
pleased to favor him in that way," and that his 
fees are two pistoles for inoculating, and twenty 
shillings per week board, the average cost to each 
patient being ^5 14s. 

Ryland Randolph writes to his brother at a time 
when inoculation is still a new thing: "I wrote 
to my Mother for her consent to be inoculated for 
the small -pox, but since see that she thinks it a 
piece of presumption. When you favor me with 
a line, pray let me have your opinion of it!" 

In 1768, we find the authorities at William and 
Mary resolving "that an ad. be inserted in the 
Gazette to inform the Publick that the College is 
now clear of small -pox, " and a few days later they 
frame another resolution that "fifty pounds be 
allowed to Dr. Carter for his care and attendance 
on those afflicted with said disorder at the College." 

Meanwhile the colonists had not followed up 

their good beginning at Mount Malado. Hospitals 

had not grown with the growth of the community. 

Doctors had none of the advantages of the study 

284 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

of surgery and medicine which are given by the 
hospital system, but the sick were tenderly cared 
for, nevertheless. In Jefferson's notes on the 
advantages enjoyed by the Virginians, he speaks 
of: "their condition too when sick, in the family 
of a good farmer where every member is emu- 
lous to do them kind offices, where they are vis- 
ited by all the neighbors, who bring them the 
little rarities which their sickly appetites may 
crave, and who take by rotation the nightly watch 
over them, without comparison better than in a 
general hospital where the sick, the dying and the 
dead are crammed together in the same room, and 
often in the same bed." When we read the 
accounts of hospitals in the eighteenth century, 
antiseptics unknown, and even ordinary cleanliness 
uncommon, we can readily agree with the con- 
clusion that "Nature and kind nursing save a 
much greater proportion in our plain way, at a 
smaller expense, and with less abuse." 

Every wind that swept the sick-room in those 
colonial farm houses, brought balm from the pines, 
or vigor from the sea. Three thousand miles of 
uncontaminated air stretched behind them and 
before. This pure, balmy, bracing air cured the 
sick, and kept the well in health, in spite of 
general disregard of hygiene, which prevailed 
almost universally, especially in all matters of 
285 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

diet. "We may venture to affirm," exclaims a 
horrified Frenchman, fresh from the land of scien- 
tific cookery, " that if a premium were offered for 
a regimen most destructive to the teeth, the 
stomach and the health in general, none could be 
desired more efficacious for these ends than that 
in use among this people. At breakfast they 
deluge the stomach with a pint of hot water 
slightly impregnated with tea, or slightly tinctured, 
or rather coloured with coffee ; and they swallow, 
without mastication, hot bread half-baked, soaked 
in melted butter, with the grossest cheese and salt 
or hung be'ef, pickled pork, or fish, all which can 
with difficulty be dissolved. At dinner, they 
devour boiled pastes, called absurdly puddings, 
garnished with the most luscious sauces. Their 
turnips and other vegetables are floated in lard or 
butter. Their pastry is nothing but a greasy paste 
imperfectly baked." 

The entire day, according to this cheerful 
observer, is passed in heaping one indigestible 
mass on another, and spurring the exhausted 
stomach to meet the strain, by wines and liquors 
of all sorts. The population who lived on such 
a diet, ought to have died young, to point the 
moral of the hygienist ; but Nature pardons much 
to those who live in the open air. If digestions 
were taxed, nerves remained unstrained. Even in 
286 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

our age of hurry and bustle, anything like nervous 
prostration is rare, south of Mason and Dixon's 
line. The soft air and the easy life soothe the 
susceptibilities, and oil the wheels of existence. 
It is for these reasons, perchance, that the records 
of the burying-grounds in the Southern colonies 
show such a proportion of names of octogenarians 
who had survived to a ripe old age, in spite of 
hot breads washed down with hotter liquors. 

These burying-grounds of the old South are 
robbed of much of the dreariness of their kind by 
being generally laid out in close proximity to the 
living world, as if the chill of the tomb were 
beaten back by the fire-light falling on it from the 
familiar hearth stone close at hand. It is a com- 
fort to think of genial Colonel Byrd, who loved 
so well the good things of this world, resting under 
a monument which duly sets forth his virtues, on 
the edge of the garden at Westover, beneath an 
arbor screened only by vines from the door where 
he passed in and out for so many years. 

Hugh Jones, that conservative son of the 
church, lamented that the Virginians did not 
prefer to lie in the church-yard for their last long- 
sleep. "It is customary," he says regretfully, 
"to bury in garden, or orchards, where whole 
families lye interred together, in a spot, generally 
handsomely enclosed, planted with evergreens, 

287 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

and the graves kept decently. Hence, likewise, 
arises the occasion of preaching funeral sermons 
in houses where, at funerals, are assembled a great 
congregation of neighbors and friends ; and if you 
insist on having the service and ceremony at 
church, they'll say they will be without it, unless 
performed after their own manner." 

Here we have a flash of the spirit of resistance 
to undue encroachments from church or state, 
which flamed up half a century later into open 
revolt. There is something touching in this cling- 
ing to the home round which so many memories 
cluster, in this desire to lay the dead there close 
to all they had loved, and when their own time 
came, to lie down beside them under the shadow 
of the old walls which had sheltered their infancy, 
and youth, and age. 

If the burying-grounds were cheerful, still more 
so were the funerals. They partook, in fact, of 
the nature of an Irish wake. Wine was freely 
drunk, and funeral baked meats demolished, while 
the firing of guns was so common that many asked, 
by will that it be omitted, as friends to-day are 
"kindly requested to omit flowers." 

The funeral expenses of a gentleman of Balti- 
more town in the eighteenth century were some- 
what heavy, as any one may judge from an itemized 
account preserved to us, which includes : " Coffin 
288 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

£6 16s, 41 yds. crape, 32 yds. black Tiffany, n 
yds. black crape, 5^ broadcloth, 7^ yards of 
black Shaloon, 16% yds. linen, 3 yds. sheeting, 3 
doz. pairs men's black silk gloves, 2 doz. pairs 
women's do., 6 pairs men's blk. gloves (cheaper), 1 
pr. women's do., black silk handkerchiefs, Sj4 
yards calamanco, mohair and buckram, 13^ yds. 
ribbon, 47^ lbs. loaf sugar, 14 doz. eggs, 10 oz. 
nutmegs, i}£ pounds alspice, 20^ gallons white 
wine, 12 bottles red wine, io|^ gallons rum." The 
total cost of these preparations amounts to upward 
of fifty pounds sterling, besides the two pounds to 
be paid to Dame Hannah Gash and Mr. Ireland 
for attendance, while ten shillings additional were 
allowed for " coffin furniture. " 

When a Thomas Jefferson, ancestor of the 
Thomas Jefferson, died in Virginia in 1698, his 
funeral expenses included the items: 

To Benj. Branch for a Mutton for the 

funerall 6olbs. tobacco. 

To Ann Carraway and Mary Harris for 

mourning Rings £1 

To Sam '11 Branch for makeing y e coffin.... 10 s 

For plank for y e coffin 2 s 6 d 

The list of expenses closes with unconscious 
satire, thus : " Previous item — to Dr. Bowman for 
Phisick, 60 lbs. tobacco," showing that every 
arrangement for the taking under was complete. 
280 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

These inventories and wills cast wonderful side- 
lights on the manners and customs of " y e olden 
tyme." To our age, accustomed to endless post- 
mortem litigation, there is a refreshing simplicity 
in these old documents, which seem to take for 
granted that it is only necessary to state the wishes 
of the testator. Richard Lightfoote, ancestor of 
the Virginia Lightfoots, who made his will in 1625, 
" in the first yeare of the raigne of our Soveraigne 
Lord King Charles," feeling perhaps a little fearful 
of disputes among his heirs, appoints Thomas 
Jones "to bee overseer herof, to see the same 
formed in all things accordinge to my true mean- 
inge ; hereby requestinge all the parties legatees 
aforenamed to make him judge and decider of 
all controversies which shall arise between them 
or anie of them." But there is no record that 
the services of Thomas Jones were needed as 
mediator, and when Jane Lightfoote, his wife, 
makes her will, she goes about it in a still more 
childlike and trustful fashion. 

She leaves her " little cottage pott" to one, and 
her "little brasse pan" to another. No object is 
too trifling to be disposed of individually. The 
inventory of Colonel Ludlow, who departed this 
life in 1660, is a curious jumble of things small 
and large. Here we have " one rapier, one hanger, 
and black belt, three p'r of new gloves and one 
290 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

p'r of horn buckskin gloves, one small silver Tank- 
ard, one new silver hat-band, two pair of silver 
breeches buttons, one wedding Ring, one sealed 
Ring, a pcell of sweet powder and 2 p'r of band 
strings," besides which is specially mentioned: 
"Judge Richardson to y e Wast in a picture," 
valued at fifty pounds of tobacco. In addition to 
these, Colonel Ludlow died possessed of "12 white 
servants and ten negroes, 43 cattle, 54 sheep and 
4 horses." 

The favorite testimonial of affection to survivors 
was the mourning ring or seal. These gifts figure 
in almost every will we examine, one mentioning 
a bequest of money for the purchase of " thirty 
rings for relatives." The keepsakes were care- 
fully cherished, and the survivors in turn set up the 
memorial tablet, or carved the tombstone, or pre- 
sented some piece of plate to the parish church, 
to keep fresh the name and memory of the de- 
ceased. In Christ Church, at Norfolk, is an old 
Alms Bason marked with a Lion Passant and a 
Leopard's Head crowned, in the centre a coat of 
arms, three Griffins' heads erased, and the inscrip- 
tion: 

"The gift of Capt. Whitwell in 

memory of Mrs. Whitwell who was 
intered in the church at Norfolk, 
y e 8 th of March, 1749." 
291 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

The same church owns a flagon with a crest, " a 
demi-man ppr-crowned in dexter three ostrich 
feathers," given by Charles Perkins as a memorial 
to his wife, Elizabeth, who died in 1762. 

It was a pleasant thought thus to renew the 
memory of departed friends by flagon, and plate, 
and alms-basin — a wiser way, one feels, than the 
carving of long epitaphs on gloomy stones sur- 
mounted by skull and cross-bones. How often, as 
we read these dreary tributes, we long for some 
shock of truth to nature, among all this decorous 
conventionalism! What tales these old colonial 
graveyards might have told us if they would! 
Here lie men who, perchance, supped with Shake- 
speare, or jested with Jonson and Marlow at The 
Mermaid. 

Here rest gallants who closed round the royal 
standard on the fatal field _of Marston Moor, or 
danced at Buckingham Palace with the free 
and fair dames of the merry court of Charles 
Second after the Restoration ; but not a word of 
all this appears on the stones that represent them. 
Their epitaphs plaster them over with all the 
Christian virtues, and obscure their individual- 
ity as completely as the whitewash brushes of 
Cromwell's soldiers obliterated the dark, quaintly 
carved oak of the cathedrals. De mortuis nil nisi 
bonum makes churchyard literature very dull read- 
293 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

ing, when it should be the most interesting and 
instructive in the world. Had the stones set forth 
the lives of those who rest beneath, we might learn 
much of such a man as Sir George Somers, whose 
strange experiences on the Sea- Venture and his ad- 
ventures on the Bermudas make me want to know 
more of him. I want to know what caused the 
trouble between him and Gates ; how he built his 
cedar ships ; how he looked, and walked, and talked ; 
and what manner of man he was, all in all. In- 
stead of gratifying my innocent curiosity, his 
tombstone in Whitchurch, where he is buried, puts 
me off with a florid verse of poor poetry, and I am 
little better helped when I turn to the records of 
the island where he died. Here Capt. Nathaniel 
Butler, " finding accidentally" (so runs the old 
chronicle) " a little crosse erected in a by-place 
amongst a great many of bushes, understanding 
there was buried the heart and intrailes of Sir 
George Somers, hee resolved to have a better 
memory of so worthy a Souldier than that. So, 
finding also a great Marble Stone brought out of 
England, hee caused it to bee wrought hand- 
somely, and laid over the place, which he invi- 
roned with a square wall of hewen stone, tombe- 
like, wherein hee caused to be graven this epitaph 
he had composed, and fixed it on the Marble Stone 
and thus it was : 

2 93 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

" In the year i 6 i i 

Noble Sir George Summers went hence to Heaven 

Whose noble, well-tried worth that held him still imploid 

Gave him the knowledge of the world so wide. 

Hence 't was by heavens decree that to this place 

He brought new guests and name to mutual grace. 

At last his soule and body being to part, 

He here bequeathed his entrailes and his heart." 

Even this gives us more information about the 
dead than most of the epitaphs. They are com- 
posed, as a rule, with Jonsonian elaborateness, and 
might as well be set up over Rasselas, as over those 
they commemorate. 

On the tomb of President Nelson of his Ma- 
jesty's Council, in the old York churchyard, a 
pompous inscription announces : " Reader, if you 
feel the spirit of that exalted ardor which aspires 
to the felicity of conscious virtue, animated by 
those consolations and divine admonitions, per- 
form the task and expect the distinction of the 
righteous man!" The "distinction of the righteous" 
is a delightful phrase, and sets forth the in- 
stinctive belief of the Cavalier in aristocracy in 
heaven. 

A Latin inscription was regarded as an appro- 
priate tribute to the learning of the deceased, 
who, had his ghost walked o' nights, might have 
needed to brush up his classics to make quite 
294 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

sure of what his survivors were saying about 
him. 

In happy contrast to the frigidity of these epi- 
taphs wherein the dead languages bury their dead, 
is the verse written by his son over the " Hon ble 
Coll. Digges," who died in 1744: 

"Diggs, ever to extremes untaught to bend 
Enjoying life, yet mindful of its end 
In thee the world an happy mingling saw 
Of sprightly humor and religious awe. " 

How it warms our hearts to find the word humor 
on a gravestone ! It takes the chill out of death 
itself, and inspires us with the hope that this most 
lovable of traits may stand as good a chance of 
immortality as Faith, Hope, or Charity. 

A brief and business-like epitaph written over 
Mistress Lucy Berkeley, declares that " She left be- 
hind her 5 children viz. 2 Boys and 3 Girls. I 
shall not pretend to give her full character; it 
would take too much room for a Grave- stone. 
Shall only say she never neglected her duty to her 
Creator in publick or private. She was charitable 
to the poor, a kind Mistress, Indulgent Mother, 
and Obedient Wife." 

For a parallel to this matron who neglected no 
duty, "publick or private," we must seek the tomb 
295 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

of a maiden. On the crumbling stone the tribute 
still survives, and tells that 

" In a Well grounded Certainty of an 

Immortal Resurrection 

Here lyes the Remains of Elizabeth 

the Daughter of 

John and Catharine Washington 

She was a Maiden 

Virtuous without Reservedness 

Wise without Affectation 

Beautiful without Knowing it 

She left this life on the Fifth day of 

Feb' in the Year MDCCXXXVI in the 

Twentieth Year of her age. " 

One more epitaph of the Colonial Cavaliers 
I must quote in full, because it alone, of all 
I have studied, does give a picture of the man 
who lies under it. If it praises him too much, 
it is to be set down to his credit that one who 
knew him well believed it all; and I for one 
wish peace to the dust of this gallant old mar- 
iner who sailed the seas in colonial days. Here 
he lies, sunk at his moorings, "one who never 
struck his flag while he had a shot in the locker ; 
who carried sail in chace till all was blue; in 
peace whose greatest glory was a staggering top- 
sail breeze ; in war to bring his broadside to bear 
upon the enemy, and who, when signals of distress 
hove out, never stood his course, but hauled or 
296 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

tacked or wore to give relief, though to a foe ; who 
steered his little bark full fifty annual cruises over 
life's tempestuous ocean and moored her safe in 
port at last; where her timbers being crazy, and 
having sprung a leak in the gale, she went down 
with a clear hawse. If these traits excite in the 
breast of humanity that common tribute to the 
memory of the departed — a sigh — then traveller as 
thou passest this wreck, let thine be borne upon 
the breeze which bends the grassy covering of the 
grave of Old Job Pray." 

This stone, like many another we find in these 
old brick-walled Southern burying-grounds, brings 
a smile which borders close upon a tear. The 
very spelling and lettering in these primitive in- 
scriptions seem moss-grown with age, and tell of 
generations passed away, bearing their manners 
and customs before them, as Mary Stuart bears her 
head on the charger in the Abbotsford picture. 
Here on one crumbling stone we read of a matron 
who hated strife with a capital " S" and loved peace 
with a little " p. " Here we read the touching little 
life-history of the young wife of John Page, who 
"blest her said Husband with a sonn and a 
Daughter and departed this life, the twelfth day 
of November, Anno Dom 1702, and in the 20th 
yeare of her age." 

The inscriptions on the oldest tombstones are 
297 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

■undecipherable. The bluestone slab under the 
ruined arch at Jamestown clasped by the roots 
of the sycamore was so broken and defaced even 
when Lossing visited it that nothing remained but 
the shadowy date, 1608. But in the earliest in- 
scriptions that survive, we are struck by the virile 
and nervous English. It smacks of "great 
Eliza's golden day." A fragment of one runs: 

"O Death ! all-eloquent, you only prove 
What dust we dote on when 't is man we love." 

But finest of all is the noble dirge, sung over 
Bacon's lifeless body by some one whose name 
will never now be surely known, since he dis- 
guised his identity, prompted by a wise dread 
of Berkeley's malignant revenge, and states that 
after Bacon's death "he was bemoaned in these 
following lines, drawn by the man that waited 
upon his person as it is said, and who attended his 
corpse to their burial place. " Whoever the writer 
was, and a high authority designates him as a 
man named Cotton, dweller at Acquia Creek, it is 
very sure that no serving-man composed these 
lines, which are like an echo of the age that gave 
us Lycidas: 

"Who is't must plead our cause? Nor trump nor drum 
Nor deputations ; these, alas ! are dumb ; 
And can not speak. Our arms, though ne'er so strong, 
Will want the aid of his commanding tongue. 
298 



THE COLONIAL CAVALIER. 

11 Here let him rest ; while we this truth report 
He's gone from hence unto a higher court 
To plead his cause, where he by this doth know, 
Whether to Caesar he was friend or foe." 

These closing words may well form the epitaph 
written over the Colonial Cavalier. He is gone 
from hence unto a higher court— gone from this 
world forever. His open-handed hospitality, his 
reckless profusion, his chivalry to women, his 
quick-tempered, sword-thrusting honor, are as 
obsolete as his lace ruffles, his doublet and jerkin, 
his buckles and jewels and feathers. We are fallen 
on a prosaic age, and it is only in our dreams of 
the past that we conjure up, like a gay decoration 
against the neutral background of modern life, the 
figure of "The Colonial Cavalier." 
299 



Appendix 



List of Authorities 



Alden's Collection of American Epitaphs and Inscriptions 

Alsop's Character of the Province of Maryland 

Anburey's Travels through the Interior Parts of America 

Bancroft's History of the United States 

Beverley's History and Present State of Virginia 

Bozman's History of Maryland 

Browne's Maryland 

Buck's Old Plate 

Burwell Papers, The 

Byrd's Westover Manuscripts 

Campbell's History of the Colon)- and Ancient Dominion 
of Virginia 

Chastellux's Travels in North America 

Cooke's Virginia 

Doyle's English Colonies in America 

Fisher's The Colonial Era 

Hammond's Leah and Rachel ; or, The Two Fruitful Sis- 
ters, Virginia and Maryland 

Hamor's True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia 

Hening's Virginia Statutes at Large 

Hildreth's History of the United States 

Howe's Historical Collections of Virginia 

Howell's State Trials 

Irving 's Life of Washington 

Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia 

Jefferson, Thomas, Life and Letters of 

Jones' True Relation of the Present State of Virginia 

Lee, Richard Henry, Life and Letters of 

303 



APPENDIX. 

Lossing's Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution 

McMaster's History of the People of the United States 

Madison, Mrs. Dolly, Life and Letters of 

Maryland Archives 

Magazine of American History 

Meade's Old Churches, Ministers, and Families of Virginia 

Moore's History of North Carolina 

Purchas : His Pilgrimes 

Ramsay's History of South Carolina 

Ridgely's Annals of Annapolis 

Robin, Abbe, New Travels through North America 

Rowland's Life of George Mason 

Scharf 's Chronicles of Baltimore 

Smith's General History of Virginia 

Smith's True Relation of Virginia 

Tyler's Life of Patrick Henry 

Tyler's History of American Literature 

Virginia Historical Register, Ed. by W. Maxwell 

Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 

Whitaker's Good Newes from Virginia 

William and Mary College Quarterly 

Wirt's Life of Patrick Henry 

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